LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



©^♦.__w fiqajrigfyi Ifxu 

Shelf J3.fe6 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Mistakes of Ingersoll. 



JAMES ff. BETHUNE. 



IbiJ Ov 



NEW YORK : 
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR, 

77 Bible House. 
1882. 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1882, by 

JAMES N. BETHUNE, 
in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at "Washington. 



MISTAKES OP INGERSOLL. 



CHAPTEK I. 

Col. Kobert G. Ihgersoll proclaims that he has 
discovered a multitude of mistakes made by Moses. I 
will prove upon him more and greater mistakes than he 
charges, but does not prove, upon Moses. 

Moses says that G-od created the heavens and the earth 
and all that they contain. Col. Ingersoll says there is no 
God. He says, ' l The universe, according to my idea, 
is, always was, and forever will be. It did not come 
into being — it is the one eternal being — the only thing 
that ever did, does, or can exist." 

While the human intellect cannot grasp the idea of a 
thing without a beginning, it is obliged to accept one or 
the other of these. If Moses tells the truth, we have a 
ready and satisfactory explanation of the origin of all 
that we see, and especially of the origin of man. If Col. 
Ingersoll's idea does not afford an equally easy and satis- 
factory explanation of all these things, it must of necessity 
be rejected, and all that its advocates can urge in its sup- 
port must be mistakes. 

There is not perhaps in the whole world another ex- 
ample in which a man claiming to be intelligent attempts 



4 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

to impose upon intelligent people, as evidence, or argu- 
ment, or common sense, such a tissue of nonsense, such a 
mass of extravagant assertion without jn*oof, and such 
gross and palpable absurdities as constitute the staple of 
his effort to establish the truth of his hypothesis. He 
says the universe always existed, and claims that nature 
does all the rest, whatever that may be. 

Let us group together what appear to be his strong 
arguments against the existence of a God and in support 
of his hypothesis — separated from his abuse and at- 
tempts at ridicule of God, and his professions of love of 
liberty, justice, free thought, free speech, etc., which of 
course have nothing to do with the question. " Beyond 
nature man cannot go, even in thought — above nature he 
cannot rise — below nature he cannot fall." 

"A deity outside of nature exists in nothing, and is 
nothing." 

"Nature is but an endless series of efficient causes. 
She cannot create, but she eternally transforms. There 
was no beginning, and there can be no end. " 

" Nature, so far as we can discover, without passion and 
without intention, forms, transforms, and retransforms 
forever." 

He believes he "came up from the lower animals." It 
is not likely that anybody will dispute that point with 
him, as it is a matter personal to himself, and perhaps 
his inner consciousness, if he has any, furnishes him evi- 
dence not vouchsafed to those who believe they are de- 
scended from a higher parentage. He certainly furnishes 
pretty good evidence of the truth of his belief, in the 
distinctive traits of the wild beasts exhibited in the blind 



MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. 5 

and savage ferocity with which he assaults God, the 
Bible, and Christianity. If his lectures have failed to pro- 
duce the conviction that he " came up from the lower 
animals," they have convinced multitudes that he is 
rapidly gravitating down to them. 

He says, "I believe that man came up from the lower 
animals. I do not say this as a fact. I simply say I be- 
lieve it to be a fact. . . . After thinking it all over, 
I came to the conclusion that I liked the doctrine. I 
became convinced in spite of myself. . . . After all, 
I had rather belong to a race that started from the skul- 
less vertebrates in the dim Laurentian seas — vertebrates 
wiggling without knowing why they wiggled, and swim- 
ing without knowing where they were going, but that in 
some way began to develop, and began to get a little 
higher and a little higher in the scale of existence ; that 
came up by degrees through all that crawls and swims 
and floats and climbs and walks, and finally produced the 
gentleman in the dugout — ... I would rather be- 
long to that race that commenced a skulless vertebrate 
and finally produced Shakespeare — a race that has before 
it an infinite future, with the angel of progress leaning 
from the far horizon beckoning men forward, upward, 
and onward forever — I had rather belong to such a race, 
commencing there, producing this, and with that hope, 
than to have sprung from a perfect pair upon which the 
Lord has been losing money every moment from that day 
to this." 

" I have given you my honest thoughts." 
These are fine brave words, very pretty talk, and highly 
complimentary to Col. Ingersoll's "skulless, crawling, 



6 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

swimming, floating, climbing and walking" ancestors. 
And it is with such stuff as this that he is insane enough 
to belieye that he can convince sensible people that there 
is no God ! 

It might have a little more of the semblance of plausi- 
bility if he had shown us how the skulless vertebrates 
came in the dim Laurentian seas, and exjDlained how, by 
wiggling, swimming, floating, climbing, and walking, 
they got up to be the great Col. Ingersoll, or even Shake- 
si") ear e. 

But, after all, it is doubtful if even Shakespeare, if he 
were alive, would be proud of the pedigree which Col. 
Ingersoll has made for him, even with the great honor of 
kinship to Col. Ingersoll thrown in. 

Shakespeare would probably say, " Look here, Col. 
Ingersoll, please don't include me in that race ; for ' blood 
will tell,' and though your character may place you out of 
the reach of injury from the association, I am afraid that 
mine may not be good enough to protect me. According 
to your doctrine, we must all be descended, or, to use 
your words, must have ' come up ' from the monkey and 
the negro, as the missing link between the man and the 
brute is between them. Now I don't know but the 
monkey and negro blood may be as good as any ; in truth 
you believe it is the only blood, and therefore the best ; 
but, as I believe in a God who created the white race 
superior to the monkey and even to the negro, I confess 
I have a preference for a descent from the superior race. 
Besides, it is said that where there is even a very small 
mixture of negro blood it is in its nature so rich and 
strong that, after having apparently disappeared for sev- 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 7 

era! generations, it sometimes suddenly crops out and re- 
verts back to the pure negro. If this be true, it may well be 
asserted that i blood will tell ; ' and though there may be 
no danger of the occurrence of such a thing in my case, or 
eyen in yours ; and though it may be a weakness in me to 
indulge such a feeling, I confess that I would not like to 
live and die under the fear of the bare possibility that my 
descendants might turn into negroes, and even into mon- 
keys. So, my dear Colonel, I will, with your permission, 
stick to the race which, in my opinion, is indebted for its 
origin to a higher source than the ( skulless vertebrates 
of the dim Laurentian seas,' and I will be obliged to you 
if, in the next edition you print of your book, you will 
leave me out as one of the products of your race. I con- 
fess I would rather be considered as having sprung from 
' a perfect pair/ however much i the Lord has lost ' 
upon me. In saying this I am only exercising my right 
of free thought and free speech without, you say man is 
an abject slave, without intending to reflect upon your 
taste or intelligence, if, differing with me, you should, 
' after thinking it all over, come to the conclusion that 
you like the idea ' of getting back to the pure rich Afri- 
can blood, an infusion of which, it is said that Mr. Sum- 
ner thought, would be a great improvement to the white 



CHAPTEK II. 

It appears that Col. Ingersoll is not the first to say 
" There is no God." It is reported that several thousands 
of years ago there was another fellow who " said in his 
heart " the same thing, whether he said it anywhere else 
we are not informed. 

Ever since there have occasionally started up some of 
the same sort, "who, like Theudas, boasted themselves 
to be somebody," but all along the great majority of the 
people, including those of the greatest intellects, the 
purest lives, the most exalted characters, and the grand- 
est achievements in all the departments of life, have 
entertained and reverently cherished the belief in the ex- 
istence of a God of creation. 

If there is or has been any man remarkable for those 
exalted qualities of head and heart which dignify and 
elevate humanity, and command the admiration and re- 
spect, and secure the love, of his fellow-beings, and who 
believed there is no God, his name has not come to my 
knowledge or has escaped my memory. 

It is not only the unquestionable right, but the para- 
mount duty, of every man to think, to investigate, and to 
determine for himself upon all matters vitally affecting his 
own interest and that, of the human race ; but before he 
undertakes to denounce, as not only erroneous, but de- 
structive of the rights and interests of the whole of man- 
8 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 9 

kind, opinions on subjects of vital importance to the 
race, opinions which have been held and acted upon by 
the best and the wisest of the men of all ages, he ought 
at least to be thoroughly convinced of one of two things, 
either that he is superior to all of them in honesty and 
intellect, or that, by some happy chance, he has discovered 
some new evidence of their error which had escaped their 
scrutiny — evidence too clear to be mistaken or misunder- 
stood, and too strong to be resisted. 

By which of these convictions Col. Ingersoll has been 
influenced to undertake to eradicate from the human 
mind the belief in the existence of a God of creation I 
shall not take upon me to decide, though I suppose it 
must be the first, for no honest man with intelligence 
enough to entitle him to sit upon a jury in a justice's 
court could, upon a full and impartial examination of all 
that he has said and written, fail to decide that he has 
not introduced a particle of evidence either new or old, 
or advanced anything approaching sound argument in 
support of his position. 

Partial insanity often exhibits itself in the form of ec- 
cessive vanity. Seeing that he has exhausted his powers 
of eulogy upon Bacon, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Paine — 
all professed and open believers in the existence of a God 
of creation — the virtual assumption of superiority in 
honesty and intellect to all of these and all others of the 
same belief, savors strongly of an excess of vanity amount- 
ing to at least partial insanity. Whether vanity has pro- 
duced the insanity or insanity has produced the vanity, is 
a question scarcely worth the trouble of an attempt to 
solve. 

1* 



10 MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 

He professes to consider the belief that there is or ever 
was a God of omnipotence who created all things wholly 
opposed to his reason, whatever that may be, but he has 
somehow managed, by the exercise of what he defines as 
" that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 
faith," to produce upon his own mind the conviction that 
the universe existed from eternity, and therefore was not 
created, and that nature has been managing every thing ; 
how long he does not tell us. But what nature is, how 
she came into existence, or whence she derived her great 
powers, he seems not to have discovered, or if he has, he 
has not thought proper to inform us. 

He attributes to ignorance and superstition the belief 
in God, the Bible, and Christianity, which he says has for 
ages held and is still holding the world in degrading 
bondage and abject slavery ; and, judging from his pro- 
fessions of interest in the welfare and happiness and sym- 
pathy for the sufferings of his fellow-beings, simple- 
minded people might be led to the conclusion that from 
pure benevolence and philanthropy he had resolved to 
dispel, by the clear and pure light of unadulterated truth, 
the dark clouds of ignorance and thick mists of supersti- 
tion by which he says the people have been so long and 
so fatally held in degrading bondage, and to lift them to 
the broad and elevated plane of intelligence and liberty 
which he claims to have reached. 

And such conclusion might be correct — perhaps. But 
there are those people who claim to understand " the ways 
that are dark and the tricks that are vain," and who 
think they are shrewd enough to have discovered that he 
is not more than half as crazy as his lectures would induce 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 11 

sensible, unsuspecting people to consider him, and un- 
charitable enough to indulge the suspicion that the half- 
dollars which are said to have flowed so abundantly into 
his coffers from his lectures have exerted no small influ- 
ence in quickening his benevolent and philanthropic feel- 
ings into life and activity. 

I express no opinion save that — whether he is whole or 
only half crazy, there is upon the money question at least 
a deal of " method in his madness." 



CHAPTEK III. 

As Col. Ingersoll appears to be possessed by a frantic 
desire and a determined purpose to destroy the Christian 
religion, as the greatest curse ever inflicted upon the 
world, he was wise to commence with the effort to prove 
that there is no God of creation ; for unless he can suc- 
ceed in this, all his assumed absurdities and imj^ossibili- 
ties, which he asserts are its only supports, and upon 
which he relies for its destruction, vanish ; and his god- 
dess nature takes a subordinate position, and, instead of 
serving as a useful ally, becomes a potent adversary. 

In view of the number and the violence of the efforts 
for the destruction of Christianity, in every age and 
country, and by every grade of intellect, and the unsav- 
ory memories left by the assailants upon every foot of 
the road they have traveled, Col. Ingersoll, in under- 
taking to travel the same road, exhibits (to use a some- 
what stale comparison) all the heroism, as well as the 
discretion, of the little bob-tailed bull that, in his rage 
and confidence, and, it may be added, his ignorance, 
squared himself for a fight with the locomotive ; but the 
bull was more excusable for his want of discretion than 
Col. Ingersoll, because he had not been warned by the 
fate of his predecessors. 

But the world has never been wanting in heroes or 
madmen who will take any hazard and make any sacri- 
12 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOIX. 13 

fice for what they consider glory, or even for notoriety 
or the hope of gain. To their imaginations there are no 
impossibilities in their paths. The failure of others 
will but add to the glory of their success ; every new 
adventurer sees the cause of all past failures in the want 
of some new element of success, which his genius has 
enabled him to discover. 

Generally, such men profess to be governed by an 
overmastering desire to confer some great good upon 
mankind, and to be sustained by the clearest conviction 
that the accomplishment of their purposes will produce 
that result and get great glory to themselves. Guiteau 
claims that God had ordered him to kill Garfield, to 
save the country from destruction. Col. Ingersoll be- 
lieves that he will confer inestimable blessings upon the 
world by killing God, the Bible, and Christianity. "Which 
of the two betrays the strongest symptoms of insanity I 
will not undertake to determine, but certainly there was 
much less of method in Guiteau's madness than in Col. 
Ingersoll's ; for unless Guiteau was hopelessly insane, he 
was obliged to know that the accomplishment of his pur- 
pose would, in all probability, consign his body to the 
gallows and his name to infamy, and that the best that he 
could hope for in any event would be a cell in the insane 
asylum ; while Col. Ingersoll, in the pursuit of his be- 
nevolent purposes, incurs no personal hazard ; and, as if 
having some lingering doubts as to the success of his 
efforts, has been careful to gather up all the half-dollars 
that came in the way, so that if his labors result in no 
good to anybody else, they have availed to fill his own 
pockets. 



14 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

Some people appear to have come to the conclusion 
that they can see great benefits that have already resulted 
to the country from the death of President Garfield. 
Such people ought to accept Guiteau's claim of Divine 
inspiration, and consider him as a patriot at heart instead 
of wanting him hung. It may be, too, that there are 
those who believe that Col. Ingersoll will render the 
world great service by destroying God, the Bible, and 
Christianity. I am not able to perceive anything but 
evil as the result of Guiteau's act ; and the little reason I 
possess does not enable me to discover, nor have- 1 imagi- 
nation enough to conceive of, any benefits that would 
accrue to the world from Col. Ingersoll's success in his 
purposes. But perhaps he may fail ; others have. 



CHAPTEE IV. 

Doubtless Col. Ingersoll attributes the failure of such 
intellects as Gibbon, Hume, Voltaire, and Paine in their 
efforts to destroy Christianity to their want of the good 
fortune of having, as he has, reached that exalted state 
of intelligence to which nature has elevated him, and 
which would have given them the knowledge that they, 
like him, had been by the plastic hand of nature wrought 
out of the "skulless vertebrates in the dim Laurentian 
seas — vertebrates wiggling without knowing why they 
wiggled, and swimming without knowing where they 
were going," and which would also have informed them 
that the almost universal belief of mankind in all ages in 
the existence of a creator of the universe was the offspring 
of ignorance and superstition, and an outrage upon reason 
and common sense. And probably it is now with him a 
matter of great self-gratulation, that to the infallibility of 
his great intellect has been reserved the honor of discover- 
ing these things, and that to its irresistible power will be 
awarded the glory of eradicating from the minds of all 
men the belief in the existence of a God of creation, and 
thereby preparing his way to an easy victory in his war 
upon Christianity. 

Judging from his lectures it would probably be safe to 
conclude that there is no other living man endowed at 
once with so many of the qualities likely to induce him to 

15 



16 MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 

engage in such an enterprise, and so many that are cal- 
culated to insure defeat. 

It is not surprising that Col. IngersolPs lectures should 
have produced a sensation, delivered as they have been 
all over the country by a man said to have been pro- 
nounced by Henry Ward Beecher " the greatest living 
orator speaking the English language." Entertaining no 
" decent respect for the opinions of mankind," holding 
nothing too sacred for a jest or a sneer, no assertion too 
bold to be made, and nothing too absurd to advocate pro- 
vided it will raise a laugh and bring in the half-dollars, 
there is no doubt that some unthinking people who seek 
amusement from his lectures, and who do not trouble 
themselves to examine closely the matter of the speech 
provided the maimer affords amusement, have received 
the impression that Col. Ingersoll has made some strong 
points against the existence of a God of creation. But 
the impartial and intelligent inquirers after truth will, 
upon a careful examination of his lectures, be surprised to 
find how little there is having any real bearing upon the 
question, and how much of that little is opposed to his 
positions. He will find them made up chiefly of bold 
assertions unsustained by proof, rough jokes, vulgar wit- 
ticisms, broad caricature, and violent denunciation, and 
that when he professes to reason his conclusions are 
drawn from unadmitted and unestablished premises, and 
that both are often contradictory, for he never fails to 
say what he thinks will please the crowd. He will find 
him, too, blest with a happy confusion of intellect, which 
renders him incapable of perceiving the inconsistencies 
and absurdities in which he so often involves himself, and 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 17 

which, furnishes him with the most striking analogies in 
very slight resemblances, as the Irishman in the rabbit- 
hunt, on finding a jackass, pronounced him the father of 
rabbits from the length of his ears. 

Col. Ingersoll is not only mighty, but reckless, in asser- 
tion ; in truth, that is his forte ; and just here I will 
present one illustration of his genius in that line. In 
one of his writings he says : " Certain it is that Jeffer- 
son could not haye written anything so manly, so strik- 
ing, so comprehensive, so clear, so convincing, and so 
faultless in rhetoric and rhythm as the Declaration of In- 
dependence." In the face of this, no surprise will be 
created by any assertion, however absurd and unfounded ; 
and the careful, intelligent seeker for truth will hesitate 
to accept without proof his assertions as to facts, or to 
adopt his opinions as to principles, without stronger sup- 
port than his assertions. 

Seeing that it is impossible for Col. Ingersoll to con- 
ceive of anything outside of and superior to what he calls 
nature, he sets about to prove that there is no God of 
creation. He says : " Each nation has created a god," 
and that " most of these gods were revengeful, savage, 
lustful and ignorant " ; but it is for the extermination of 
the God of the Bible, as the Creator of all things, that 
he gathers up all his weapons, and it is upon Him that, 
in his rage, he exhausts his powers of assertion, ridicule, 
caricature, and denunciation ; portrays Him as all that is 
cruel, tyrannical, base, and infamous, and flatters himself 
that he has succeeded in proving that He does not and 
never did exist. But, admitting Him to be all that Col. 
Ingersoll paints Him, it has nothing to do with the ques- 



18 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

tion. For the present the question is not, whether He 
is a good or a bad God, but whether there is a God who 
created the universe. That being settled, the discussion 
of His moral character may be in order ; and it will re- 
quire no very great stretch of the imagination to conceive 
that, if there be such a God, He may possibly understand 
what is right and good better than even Col. Ingersoll. 



CHAPTEE V. 

We shall get at a clear understanding of the question 
by a statement of the opinions held and maintained by 
each side of the controversy. It is admitted, I believe, 
on all hands that, apart from what is called revelation, 
we can know nothing of a God or the universe beyond 
what we can see or feel. We may do what we call rea- 
soning from the known to the unknown, and our conclu- 
sions will be more or less correct as our reasonings are 
more or less sound, so far as our reason can go ; but at 
last we reach a point beyond which reasoning cannot go, 
and we are compelled to accept, upon what Col. Ingersoll 
describes as " that unhappy mixture of insanity and ig- 
norance called faith," one of two, to the human intellect, 
incomprehensible, impossible absurdities : the one, that 
there is an uncreated Being of infinite power and intel- 
ligence, and self -existent from eternity, who created the 
universe ; the other, that dead, inert, unintelligent, un- 
created matter existed from eternity, and that, in some 
way unexplained and inexplicable, without mind and 
without intelligence, it has formed itself into all the 
grand worlds that we see, has put them in motion and 
prescribed to them their courses, their times, and their 
seasons, which they have kept with unerring exactness 
and unfailing regularity from eternity ; that this same 
dead, unintelligent matter has formed itself into all the 

19 



20 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

innumerable varieties of animal and vegetable life that 
we find upon our earth ; that in some of the forms of 
animal life it has formed itself into great physical, and in 
others has added great intellectual, power. I say that, 
according to the theory, dead, unintelligent matter has 
done all this, because, while Col. Ingersoll ascribes every- 
thing to what he calls nature, he does not inform us how 
nature originated, nor whence she derived her power ; 
and as he says "she cannot create," she must necessarily 
be a part of matter or have been created by it. If she is 
a part of matter, then, of course, matter must have done 
all the work. 

The human intellect cannot take in either of these 
theories, because it cannot conceive of anything without 
a beginning. Nevertheless here stands the hard, naked, 
incontestable fact confronting us — that the universe exists. 
Besides these two, there is no conceivable means by which 
it could have come into existence, and we have no escape 
from the acceptance of one or the other, and that accept- 
ance must be upon what Col. Ingersoll characterizes as 
" that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 
faith." 

So far as we have any traces of man, either from history 
or tradition, it is, according to Col. Ingersoll's own show- 
ing, established that, whatever of attributes, either of good 
or bad, they may have ascribed to their gods, the great 
masses of people have accepted the first of these proposi- 
tions with a faith which, if not supported by, is, from 
what we see and know, in no way opposed to or incon- 
sistent with sound reason ; and it has at least this much 
in its favor, that those who live nearest the time of the 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 21 

occurrence of any fact have better means for a correct 
knowledge of it than those who live at the greatest dis- 
tance of time from it. 

On the other hand, Col. Ingersoll, with his followers 
and predecessors, from the latter of whom he has evi- 
dently borrowed largely, has accepted the latter, with a 
miracle of faith which "throws away his reason," and, to 
use his own language, his " brain becomes the palace of 
an idiot king attended by a retinue of thieves and hypo- 
crites." 

Let it be borne in mind that I am not now defending 
the God of the Bible against Col. Ingersoll's ferocious 
attacks upon His moral character ; f 01% assuming that there 
is such a God, and admitting all his charges to be true, 
it proves nothing against His existence, His power, or His 
acts of creation. And after all it may turn out that He 
understands as well as Col. Ingersoll what is good, and 
has as clear conceptions of right and wrong. 

If the saying be true that " The man who, in an argu- 
ment, loses his temper, furnishes proof that he is in the 
wrong," we have only to read Col. Ingersoll's lecture upon 
"The Gods," in "the only correct and authorized edi- 
tion," to be convinced that he is in error ; and if the ex- 
tent of the error is to be determined by the violence of 
the temper, it is without limit, for although, in his reply 
to Judge Black, he says, " In the examination of a great 
and important question, every one should be serene, slow- 
pulsed, and calm," the bare mention of the name of God 
seems to work him up into a towering rage, and while he 
asserts that " epithets are the arguments of malice" he 
exhausts the vocabulary of epithets upon him. 



22 MISTAKES OP INGERSOLL. 

Whatever opinion may be entertained of Col. Ingersoll's 
intellectual or moral soundness, or unsoundness, the he- 
roic Quixotism with which he undertakes the generally 
difficult and, in the present case, the evidently impos- 
sible feat of proving a negative commands our admira- 
tion and entitles him to a clear field and a fair hearing, 
which he shall have. 

As I have said, I am not defending God's moral char- 
acter. For the present I do not propose to offer any 
evidence in proof even of His existence. I simply in- 
tend, by exposing Col. Ingersoll's absurdities and contra- 
dictions, his bold, senseless, and unfounded assertions, 
to show that he has proved nothing against it. But, 
while I shall not offer directly auy evidence in favor of 
it, much will necessarily come to light from this exposure. 
I do not even intend to confront him with the Bible, be- 
cause those who believe in the Bible need no further evi- 
dence of the existence of a God ; and with those who do 
not believe in a God, the Bible would be of no authority. 

I have never believed in the policy so often and, as I 
think, unwisely recommended, of "fighting the devil 
with fire." If I have to fight man or devil, I prefer the 
weapon in the use of which not he, but I, am most 
skillful ; and, if the devil assail me with fire, I prefer to 
extinguish it with holy water. Col. Ingersoll's most 
effective weapon is bold assertion, without proof. With- 
out that he would have nothing by which to bring his 
others into requisition. I shall not contend against him 
with that weapon. 

It is true — and with about as much ground for it as 
Guiteau in seeking an appointment had for claiming that 



MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. 23 

Logan and Blaine were in his favor — Col. Ingersoll 
claims that he has two powerful allies to support him — 
reason and science. He often calls upon them as wit- 
nesses in his behalf, but, like Blaine and Logan in the 
Guiteau case, they repudiate his claim. G-uiteau, with 
all his insanity, was too shrewd to be caught in such a 
trap. He did not call Blaine and Logan on his trial. 

It is related that, upon an occasion when Philip of 
Macedon had been indulging too freely in his cups, one 
of his subjects, a rough countryman, applied 'to him to 
redress some wrong he had suffered, and being rudely 
repulsed, he cried out : " I appeal ! " Philip, incensed 
by his insolence, sternly demanded : ' ' To whom can you 
appeal from the king ? " The countryman boldly replied : 
" I appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober," which 
brought Philip to his senses. 

In this investigation I intend to oppose Col. Ingersoll 
sane to Col. Ingersoll insane ; for, notwithstanding all 
his reckless assertions, his gross absurdities, his palpable 
self-contradictions, his grotesque vagaries, and his insane 
ravings, he is occasionally visited by lucid intervals, in 
which he utters sound reason and good common sense 
enough to demolish the whole fabric of insane and incon- 
gruous hallucinations to the construction of which a large 
portion of his life appears to have been devoted ; but that 
"happy confusion of intellect " to which I have referred 
seems to have held him in blissful ignorance of the legiti- 
mate effects of those utterances of sound reason and good 
common sense, an example of which is found in his reply 
to Judge Black, when he says : " The mind of every 
thoughtful man is forced to one of these two conclusions : 



24 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

either that the universe is self-existent, or that it was 
created by a self -existent being." 

Here is the whole question fully and clearly stated in 
less than three lines of large print in the North American 
Review. He continues : "To my mind there are far 
more difficulties in the second hypothesis than the first." 

In no aspect of the case can I perceive how the second 
hypothesis can present to any rational mind "far more 
difficulties than the first." To my mind it would be an 
exceedingly liberal proposition to admit that the difficul- 
ties in both cases would be equal, provided our reason re- 
quired or even permitted us to reject, as opposed to or 
inconsistent with its dictates, everything that we cannot 
comprehend or fully understand. But, fortunately for 
the cause of truth, reason neither requires nor permits 
this ; for we are constantly met in our every-day life by 
things outside of the domain of reason and intellect, and 
utterly beyond our comprehension. We can no more 
understand or explain how it is that, when a cow and a 
sheep live upon the same food, one should produce hair 
and the other wool, or why the wool of one sheep should 
be white and the other black, than we can comprehend 
and understand the existence of God and creation, and 
everything connected with the infinite. Yet nobody 
ever thinks of asserting that these things are inconsistent 
with or opposed to reason. 

Our reason unhesitatingly, perhaps unconsciously, and 
certainly very wisely, adopts the conclusion that these 
things are the results of laws impressed upon the consti- 
tution of each animal in its creation by its creator, and 
that the reasons for those laws and their modes of opera- 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 25 

tion are alike outside of the limits prescribed to the pow- 
ers of investigation by the human intellect. 

These difficulties were fully understood and appreciated 
thousands of years ago, when it was asked : " Canst thou 
by searching find out God ? Canst thou find out the 
Almighty to perfection ? " 

But the hypothesis fayored by Col. Ingersoll, al- 
though taken by itself it might be tolerated as one of the 
harmless illusions of a distempered imagination, when 
considered with its accompaniments, is so diametrically 
opposed to every conclusion that sound reason can reach, 
either by deduction or induction from what we really 
know, that a sound and intelligent mind can find no 
difficulty in the way of rejecting, it; indeed, it forces a 
rejection. In fact, in yiew of all that we know and all 
that we see every day and every night, the bare statement 
of the proposition stamps absurdity on its face. 
2* 



CHAPTER VI. 

The term "universe" of course includes everything 
that exists, except God, if there is a God. To avoid all 
controversy about terms, we will take Col. Ingersoll's 
definition of it. He says : " The universe, according to 
my idea, is, always was, and forever will be. It did not 
come into being ; it is the one eternal being — the only 
thing that ever did, does, or can exist." 

This is bare assertion, which, as I have said, in view 
of all that we see and actually know, bears the stamp of 
absurdity on its face. There is but one way to prove it, 
and that is to prove there is no God. The extent to 
which Col. Ingersoll's argument can go is : " There is 
no God ; therefore, the universe always was." But how 
do you know there is no God ? " Because I have just 
proved that the universe always was, and therefore there 
can be no God." The only other argument that Col. 
Ingersoll relies upon to prove there is no God is that, by 
the accounts of His friends, He is a very bad God. 

As it is not my purpose for the present to defend the 
moral character of God, nor even to attempt to prove 
that there is one, but simply to show that Col. Ingersoll 
has not urged a semblance of argument against His ex- 
istence, I might here stop the discussion, which I would 
do but for two reasons : First, there may be some hard 
cases not yet convinced, and there is evidence behind 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 27 

enough, to reach, the most hardened skepticism. Second, 
from whatever motives Col. Ingersoll may have been in- 
fluenced to engage in the desperate enterprise of attempt- 
ing to destroy G-od, the Bible, and Christianity, — whether 
from overweening vanity in over estimating his own intel- 
lectual powers or underrating those of others, a mischiev- 
ous desire to play upon the credulity of the multitude, 
an insatiable thirst for notoriety or gold, a pure spirit of 
benevolence and philanthropy, or some other motive more 
or less worthy, — he evidently manifests some strong 
symptoms of insanity, and has involved himself in a 
labyrinth of absurdities and contradictions, from which 
he appears to be utterly unable to extricate himself with- 
out help. Perhaps we are all more or less insane, in 
consideration of which it may be that, in the asylums 
for the insane of modern times, the old appliances of the 
straight-jacket and corporal punishment have given place 
to instruction, kind treatment, and amusements. 

Besides this, people sometimes repeat as a jest, or what 
they consider a witticism, what at first they know to be 
a lie, until, by mere force of repetition, they become 
thoroughly convinced of its truth, as the old negro as- 
serted, until he believed it true, that "he remembered 
perfectly when the James Eiver at Eichmond was noth- 
ing but a little spring branch." This is not a whit 
stranger than the hallucinations which sometimes take 
possession of minds otherwise sound, and which, for the 
time being, have all the effect of reality upon the feelings 
and actions. For example, that a man should conceive 
that he was made of glass, and suffer great fear when 
anybody was approaching him, lest by coming in collision 



28 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

lie should be broken in pieces ; and hundreds of other 
cases "which are reported of like character. Sometimes 
they are thrown into great trepidation by seeing snakes 
and monkeys pursuing them. But Col. Ingersoll's is the 
only case I ever heard of in which the madness took the 
form and had the effect of making the victim believe and 
boast that his ancestors were snakes and monkeys. It is 
probable that at the first Col. Ingersoll said these things 
in the way of his trade, to raise a laugh and draw the 
half-dollars, and finding them, as Eedpath says of him, 
" a good card," he repeated them until he got to believe 
them true : 

" Like one 

Who having unto truth, by telling of it, 

Made such a sinner of his memory 

To credit his own lie." 

Men are sometimes cured of these hallucinations by 
having them kindly and gently presented to them in such 
a manner as to convince them that there is nothing real 
in them, but are the morbid creations of a distempered 
imagination, and I propose to endeavor to relieve Col. 
Ingersoll in that way ; and I have strong hopes that he 
may yet, like the man out of whom the legion of devils 
were cast, be "found sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed 
and in his right mind ; " and my hopes are strengthened 
by the fact that last summer, when the doctors were 
pronouncing Garfield on the highway of recovery, a man, 
I believe of Illinois, predicted that he would die, and 
that Col. Ingersoll would be converted. 

In some cases, when the victims get relief from the 
hallucinations under which they have labored, they come 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 29 

out of them like a man out of a dreamless sleep, having 
no recollection of anything that passed during the time 
of their affliction. If the prediction of the Illinois man, 
that Col. Ingersoll will be converted, shall be fulfilled, 
and he should retain a recollection of his life for the last 
ten years, he will be no longer surprised that one human 
soul can entertain devils enough to drive two thousand 
hogs to the commission of suicide. 



CHAPTEK VII. 

The idea that the universe has existed from eternity is 
an old one, but it is possible that Col. IngersolPs idea of 
growing himself and Shakespeare and all the rest of us 
from "the skulless vertebrates of the dim Laurentian 
seas," where we "wiggled without knowing why we wig- 
gled," was an afterthought. It seems that in early life 
he conceived the benevolent idea of relieving the world 
from ignorance, superstition, slavery, crime, and misery, 
by eradicating from the human mind the belief in God, 
to w r hich he attributed the origin and existence of all 
these evils, and, without duly considering, or utterly dis- 
regarding, the difficulties in the way, heroically went to 
work to accomplish this great work. Difficulties, so far 
from diverting' him from his great purpose, only increased 
his confidence and his courage. Having sworn that the 
horse was sixteen feet high, he determined to stick to it. 
But, perhaps finding it necessary to account in some 
way for the work that has been done and is still going on 
in the world, he brings in what he calls "nature," who, 
he says, works " without passion or intention," who gov- 
erns all words, actions, thoughts, feelings, and in fact all 
things, physical, intellectual, and moral, by a " mechani- 
cal necessity," thus divesting all actions, thoughts, words, 
sentiments, and feelings of all character, moral or im- 
moral, and making man and everything else mere help- 
30 



MISTAKES OF INaEESOLL. 31 

less, passive, irresponsible tools of a controlling power 
which they haye neither the will nor the ability to resist. 

At one time he tells of the great crimes that have been 
committed by kings, at another by priests, at another by 
churches; what great sufferings haye resulted to the 
human family, sometimes from these crimes, sometimes 
from superstition, and sometimes from ignorance, and 
what great things some men haye done, and what he is 
now doing, to correct all these eyils, but ends by making 
nature responsible for all of them. What a world this 
would be if it conformed to his creations ! He has uncon- 
sciously giyen an apt delineation of what it would be 
when he says, " It is as though we should giye to a lion 
the wings of an eagle, the hoofs of a bison, the tail of a 
horse, the pouch of a kangaroo, and the trunk of an ele- 
phant. We haye in imagination created an impossible 
monster." That is just what his goddess, nature, form- 
ing, transforming, and retransforming, without passion 
and without intention, would be likely to do. 

What progress Col. Ingersoll is making towards the ac- 
complishment of his great undertaking I am not informed, 
nor can I guess how long it will be before he completes it. 
I understand that he is yery well satisfied with the result 
so far, but I imagine that he is yery much in the condi- 
tion of the old woman in her chase after the partridges, 
when I last heard from her. As the story goes, there was 
an old woman who was importunate in her request to a 
young man to marry her. One clay when she was urging 
her request a flock of a dozen partridges passed them. To 
get rid of her, the young man told her that if she would 
run down and catch all of them he would marry her. Of 



32 MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 

course, the thing got out, and soon became the standing 
jest of the neighborhood. About a month afterwards, one 
of the neighbors, going along the road, saw the old lady- 
blowing, panting, and sweating, trotting along through 
the dust and sunshine, with one of the partridges play- 
ing along before her. "Well, old lady," he asked, "how 
are you getting on?" "Mighty well, mighty well." 
"How many have you got to catch?" "Only eleven, 
and this one before me ! " And on 8 she trotted after it. 

It is my opinion that, in his efforts to eradicate the be- 
lief in God from the world, he is now and always will be 
just about as successful as the good old lady had been, 
by the last accounts, in catching the partridges. He has 
this advantage over her. Her hopes of reward were all 
in the future ; he, from report, is picking up the half- 
dollars abundantly as he goes along. 

But I have digressed. Let us return to the subject, as 
Col. Ingersoll, in one of his lucid intervals, presents it. 

" The mind of every thoughtful man is forced to one of 
these two conclusions : either that the universe is self- 
existent, or that it was created by a self -existent being." 
Here is the real issue clearly and distinctly presented. 
Col. Ingersoll adopts the first hypothesis as the true one ; 
and, without introducing a particle of evidence, or urg- 
ing the semblance of a sound argument in support of the 
one, or against the other, he runs out into extravagant 
assertions, and brings into play all his powers of denuncia- 
tion, ridicules and wit to frighten, cajole, or laugh people 
out of their belief in a God of creation. The true question, 
as presented by himself, is, "Was the universe created by 
a self -existent being ? " And I defy any man of good com- 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 33 

mon sense to put his finger upon a particle of evidence, 
or a semblance of sound argument, that he has presented 
in the negative. 

I repeat, the question is not whether, according to Col. 
Ingersoll's ideas, He is a good or a bad God, not whether 
He committed murder in commanding the Jews to kill 
people, nor whether this or that nation had one opinion 
or another of Him, not whether He violated all the com- 
mandments He has given to men, not whether He com- 
manded men to be the first to hurl the rugged stones at 
the tender bosoms of their wives, not whether He gave 
His children farms full of briers and bushes and beasts 
of prey and poisonous reptiles, not whether the Bible is 
true or false, nor whether the church is pure or corrupt, 
nor whether Christianity is divine or the cunningly de- 
vised fables of priestcraft to enslave the minds of men — 
for assertions like these constitute the staple of what Col. 
Ingersoll considers, and seems to expect sensible people 
to receive, as arguments ; and all these things might be 
true without proving anything ; but the question is, 
" Did God, in the beginning, create the heavens and the 
earth ? " 

Possibly I may be able hereafter to present some evi- 
dences and arguments in support of the affirmative of this 
question ; but for the present my business is with what 
Col. Ingersoll considers his arguments, for he produces 
no evidence in support of the negative. And it may be 
well just here to call up Col. Ingersoll, and give him a 
chance to enforce and illustrate some of what he calls his 
arguments ; and as he frequently talks about a watch, we 
will hear him on that. 
2* 



CHAPTEE VIII. 

About the beginning of this century there was in 
Liverpool a celebrated watchmaker by the name of 
Roskell ; at least I have always believed there was, and 
it seemed to be generally believed ; in fact, I never 
heard an expression of .doubt upon the subject, and have 
seen many watches with his name engraved upon them, 
as evidence of the existence and skill of the workman, as 
the evidence of God's existence and power is stamped 
upon all of His works. 

Let us suppose that Col. Ingersoll, in conversation 
with a friend, should pull out his watch to get the time, 
and his friend, on seeing it, should remark : " Colonel, 
that is an elegant watch you have there ; it looks like an 
old Roskell." 

I propose to give such a conversation as I suppose this 
remark and Col. Ingersoll's principles, so far as I can 
make them out, might naturally and certainly lead to : 

Colonel. Yes, it's a fine watch, and it has "Robert 
Roskell " engraved on the inside ; but he never made it, 
and, as a matter of fact, there was never any such man. 

Friend. How do you know that ? 

Colonel. Why, I have known a great many people who 

believed there was such a man, and that he made these 

watches with his name on them, though they had never 

seen him ; and they have told m© that he whipped his 

U 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 35 

wife, beat and sometimes killed his children ; and, more- 
over, that he often took watches that he had made and 
broke them to pieces for amusement, or because they did 
not suit him exactly, or because he had got into a passion ; 
and a great many other mean and cruel things I haye 
heard of his doing ; and I tell you I don't believe 
there was ever any such man, or that he made any 
watches. 

Friend. And do you believe all these things you have 
heard of him ? 

Colonel. Certainly I do ; for they have been told me 
by his friends ; and, besides, I know that wives have 
been whipped, and children beaten and starved, and 
even killed, and watches and other things smashed ; and 
they might as well have been done by him as by other 
people. 

Friend. Well, that's rather puzzling to me ; you've 
got a great deal more sense, Colonel, than I have, and 
understand these things better ; but I can't understand 
how a man can have a wife and whip her, and children 
and beat them, and make watches and smash them, and 
yet there be no man to have and to do these things. I 
suppose you can explain it all, so as to make it plain to 
you; but I don't think I've got sense enough to under- 
stand it if you were to explain it ; but there is one thing 
perhaps you can explain, so that I can understand it. 
Here's the watch — who made it ? 

Colonel. Who made it ? Why, nobody. 

Friend. Well, how came it here ? 

Colonel. Why, nature made it. 

Friend. Well, Colonel, it is my opinion that if you 



36 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

are in earnest, and believe what you say, you are gone 
clean crazy. Will you tell me how nature made it ? 

Colonel. I am in dead earnest, and I am not crazy, 
either. I can tell you very easily, and rationally, too, 
and so plainly that you can see it just as clearly as that 
two and two make four, how nature made it. She did 
not make the materials of which it is composed, for she 
" cannot create," but, " without passion or intention, 
forms, transforms, and retransforms forever." The ma- 
terials were not made — they just came so. She finds 
them ready to her hands. Of course you know that, by 
her " absolute, eternal, inexorable laws," she has made 
all atoms of matter attract each other. So she made 
some atoms of copper and zinc attract each other and 
made brass, which she "formed, transformed, and re- 
transformed " until she had made it into all the neces- 
sary wheels, with exactly the right number of cogs in 
each, and all this "without intention;" and then, by 
the same process of attraction, forming, transforming, 
and re transforming, she got some iron, and "formed, 
transformed, and retransformed " it until she made it 
into steel, and then she "formed, transformed, and re- 
transformed " it until she got it into the main-spring 
and into the hair-spring; and all this without inten- 
tion ; and then she got the diamonds for the wheels to 
run upon, and the gold to make the case, and the sand 
and soda to make the glass for the crystal, and then 
"formed, and transformed, and retransformed," until at 
last she got everything into its place, and all this "with- 
out intention," and, as you see, a perfect watch is the 
result. 



MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. 37 

Friend, Well, Colonel, now I know yon are crazy, or 
else yon are a natnral-bom fool. 

Colonel. No, I ain't crazy, neither, nor a natural-born 
fool. It is you who are too ignorant and too supersti- 
tions to understand nature. I'll exj)lain it to you. 
You, of course, know that nature took a little speck of 
something — we don't exactly know what it is, as she 
hides that from us — and "formed, and transformed, 
and retransformed " it until she got it into one of those 
" skulless vertebrates in the dim Laurentian seas — ver- 
tebrates wiggling without knowing why they wiggled, 
and swimming without knowing where they were going," 
— and then " transformed and retransformed" them until 
she has made them into all plants and trees, and all ani- 
mals, and at last made a man and woman, from which I, 
and Shakespeare, and Lincoln, and Washington, and 
you, and all of us have sprung. Now, any fool can see 
that it is a great deal easier to make a watch than a man, 
or even a woman. 

Friend. But it seems to me that this watch gives un- 
questionable evidence of plan and design, which you say 
you know nothing about. 

Colonel. Why, man, that's the beauty of my doctrine. 
" Nature, so far as we discern, without passion and with- 
out intention, forms, transforms, and retransforms for- 
ever." That is the reason why we have so many different 
kinds of plants and trees, and so many different kinds of 
animals. Instead of wasting her time in planning and 
designing, she just went to work forming, transforming, 
and retransforming. She never had any idea what she 
was going to make ; her own " absolute, eternal, inexo- 



38 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

rable laws," without giving her any information, or even 
consulting her, determined the result of her work ; some- 
times it turned out a fish and sometimes a stone, a worm 
or a tree, a sheep or a tiger, a grasshopper or an eagle, a 
fly or an elephant ; but she has kept on forming, trans- 
forming, and retransforming until she has made every- 
thing we see. 

Friend. But, Colonel, since nature has set all these 
worlds in motion, and so easily keeps them in their reg- 
ular times and motions, it seems to me that she might 
have saved all the trouble of making all those wheels and 
springs by making for us a pretty little thing which 
would move all the time by attraction, gravitation, elec- 
tricity, magnetism, or some of her other contrivances, 
and which would always point out the time just exactly 
right, and every ten or fifteen minutes cry out the time, 
if we should forget to look at it. 

Colonel. There is no doubt she will do that some of 
these days ; she is constantly at work, but you must re- 
member she has been in the watch-making business, so 
far as we know, only three or four hundred years ; give 
her time, and she will reach perfection. She "formed, 
transformed, and retransformed " for thousands, and, for 
aught that we know, millions of years before she made a 
man ; and up to this time we know of nothing she has 
made superior to me and Shakespeare, but I believe she 
will some time make a race with all the faculties and 
powers that we possess, with the addition of wings, by 
which we shall be enabled to fly like the birds ; and, in 
fact, I am now going to tell you what I never told any- 
body before, I believe she has made such a race. 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 39 

Friend. Why, Colonel, -what in the world put snch 
nonsense into your head ? 

Colonel. "Well, as I have told you so much, I may as 
well tell you the whole of it. 

A long time ago there was an English ship traversing 
some of the distant and then unfrequented seas, when, 
one day, the man on watch discovered, at a great distance, 
a large body in the air moving with great velocity directly 
towards the ship. He gave the alarm, and all hands im- 
mediately came on deck to see it. It was something evi- 
dently transported by beings having the appearance of 
men, with the addition of wings. As the body was large, 
and was evidently approaching the ship, the captain and all 
the crew were in great consternation lest the purpose might 
be to drop it on the ship and sink it. The captain therefore 
ordered a cannon to be fired at it, and those who were carry- 
ing it immediately dropped it into the water and flew on 2 . 
Upon approaching it the captain found that it was a large 
wooden raft, and, to the great astonishment of himself 
and his crew, it was found that there was a man upon it. 
The shock received from the fall had rendered him insen- 
sible; in fact he appeared to be dead ; but he was taken 
on board, and it was found that life was not extinct. For 
a long time, many days in fact, he was unconscious, and 
hovering between life and death, but at length, by the 
administration of restoratives, and the careful nursing of 
the only passenger on board, he was ultimately restored 
to consciousness ; but it was found that his system had 
received such a shock from the fall that there was little 
hope of a final recovery. Indeed, he communicated to 
his friend his conviction that his lease upon life was shorty 



40 MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 

and his anxiety to give to the world an account of his 
adventures which ended so strangely. As, from internal 
injuries he had received, conversation was both laborious 
and painful, he devoted himself almost entirely to writ- 
ing. The voyage proved to be a long one, and he died 
before the ship reached her destination. A few minutes 
before his death, he called his friend to him, and said: 
" My dear friend, I cannot express to you in words my grat- 
itude to you for your kindness; I have nothing with which 
to make you any return, but that manuscript lying there 
on the table. It contains a true account of the wonder- 
ful adventures which have befallen me, and of which you 
have witnessed the end. Take it, and, by publishing it, 
you may receive some compensation for your kindness to 
me." This was the account given of it by his friend 
when he published it. 

It has been a long time since I have read it, and my 
memory, though, as you know, a very extraordinary one, 
will enable me to give you the most prominent outlines 
only, as at that time I did not attach to it that impor- 
tance which the grand discoveries I have since made, 
as to the powers of nature, now give it. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

The man's name was Peter Wilkins, an Englishman 
born and reared in London. He had from his yonth 
great fondness for the sea, particularly for long voyages. 
In his last but the one I have just mentioned the ship 
on which he was embarked was for many days driven by 
a violent adverse wind into unknown seas, where they 
discovered that they were approaching land not laid 
down upon any of the charts ; and, as the sky was all 
the time hidden from view by thick clouds, they were 
unable to take any observations by which to find their 
latitude or longitude. The ship was driven with great 
violence upon a ledge of rocks not far from the shore, 
and Peter, without knowing how long he had lain there, 
awoke to consciousness finding himself lying on the 
shore. Upon looking around him, he saw the broad sea 
now calm and smooth, and the shore lined with pieces 
of the ship and much of the cargo, which had been 
washed ashore, but not a living soul ; all but he had 
evidently perished. 

In due season he found that he was on a beautiful, 
well- wooded country, with plenty of wild fruits, but, so 
far as he could discover, uninhabited by people. 

His first work was to provide himself some place for 
his own comfort and security, and for the preservation 
and protection of as much as possible of the cargo of the 

41 



42 MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 

vessel ; for, as she had been victualed for a long voyage, 
there were not only plenty of provisions, but many other 
things of value thrown upon the shore. In some of the 
rocks near the shore he found a cave, which offered him 
shelter for the present, and which in time he was enabled 
to make very comfortable by a little labor and the aid of 
bedding, tables, chairs, and many other conveniences 
gathered from the wreck. 

He had been there something less than a year, spend- 
ing most of the time in anxiously but vainly watching 
for some passing ship to relieve him from his solitary and 
lonely life, when, one warm, clear, moonshiny night, 
he heard what appeared to him the sound of the mingling 
of many human voices. Filled with joy by the idea that 
the sounds proceeded from the voices of the crew of some 
vessel that had arrived after dark without having been 
perceived by him, he rushed out of his cave to meet 
them. But, instead of finding a ship and its crew, he 
was greeted by a sight which filled him with astonish- 
ment and awe. The water, as far as the eye could reach, 
was covered by very small boats, which appeared to be 
propelled by sails ; but, though there was barely a per- 
ceptible breeze, they darted with amazing speed in every 
direction. From every boat proceeded peals of laughter, 
or what he supposed was conversation, and they seemed to 
be engaged in some sort of sport. Some appeared to be 
racing, others in chasing each other, and others in trying 
to see what fancy figures they could make on the water, 
as we see people do in skating ; while above them the air 
was filled with flying bodies engaged in the same way. 

Secreting himself in a clump of bushes near by, he 



MISTAKES OF INGKEESOLL. 43 

watched the scene for three hours, when a strange sound 
came from one of the flying bodies, which seemed to be 
a signal ; to his unutterable astonishment, he saw every 
boat rise up into the air and fly off with the others. 

This was the first night after the moon had reached 
her first quarter, and the scene was reenacted every night 
until the third after her full. Every night Peter had, 
from his hiding-place, watched the scene" with the hope 
of discovering a clue to the explanation of this wonderful 
phenomenon. On this night the sports had been con- 
tinued much longer than previously, and Peter had, a 
few minutes before twelve o'clock, left his hiding-place 
and gone to his cave, for the purpose of retiring for the 
night. He had been there but a few minutes when, as 
if wonders were never to cease with him, he heard, as if 
almost within his door, a shrill shriek, followed immedi- 
ately by a dull thud of a sound, as if some heavy body had 
been forcibly dashed against the side of the rock. Hastily 
running out, he discovered by the light of the moon the 
apparently lifeless body of a woman. He shouted aloud, 
hoping to call some of those who, he instinctively con- 
cluded, were her companions ; but he heard no sound 
and saw nobody ; all was silent and still — they were all 
gone. He carried her in and laid her upon his bed. He 
saw that she was wholly unconscious, and feared that she 
was fatally injured. He administered some stimulating 
restorative and sat by her all night, bathing her temples 
and rubbing her hands and feet ; and shortly after the 
sun arose, to his ineffable delight he saw her eyes open. 
Fortunately, though badly bruised, it turned out that no 
bones were broken, nor any fatal injury sustained. 



CHAPTEK X. 

Suffice it to say, that after several weeks of con- 
finement to the bed, she was so far recovered as to be 
able to walk a little with his help. In the mean time 
they had fallen desperately in love with each other, and, 
with no witness but nature, then and there vowed eter- 
nal fidelity to each other and became man and wife. He 
discovered that what appeared to be her dress were her 
wings, which, springing from her shoulders, enveloped 
her person like a garment, without interfering with the 
use of her limbs — serving as dress on land, as sails on the 
water, and wings in the air. 

At first they could converse by signs only ; but they 
soon learned enough of the language of each other to 
make themselves understood ; and the account she gave 
him was, that her people lived far off from that place, 
and once every year came, as he had seen, to enjoy sea- 
bathing ; that on the night on which he found her, 
being the last for the season, they continued the sport to 
the last moment allowed ; and that, she and another girl 
having been chasing each other, she darted down among 
the trees very rapidly, to escape from the sight of her 
pursuer, and had, while looking behind her, got so near 
the rock that she could not stop in time to save herself 
from the collision, which but for his care would doubt- 
less have proved fatal. 
44 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 45 

The next year at the same time the people returned, 
and to their great joy found her alive. When they left 
they fixed up a sort of a hammock to carry him, and 
took him, his wife, and the child which had been born 
to them with them ; by the way, the child was born with 
wings like its mother's. They also, at his suggestion, 
carried with them a great many of the things of most 
value which he had saved from the wreck. 

I don't remember exactly why he left the country ; but 
my impression is that his wife and children all died, and, 
finding himself alone and tied down to the earth, while 
everybody else could travel at pleasure through air and 
water, he became dissatisfied and desired to get back 
among his own people, where he would not be so con- 
stantly confronted with the evidences of his immense 
inferiority to everybody around him ; and that, in con- 
sideration of some great service he had rendered the 
king of the country, he provided him the means of trans- 
portation in the manner I have told you. 

Friend. And you believe all this ? 

Colonel. Believe it ? Why, of course I do — every word 
of it. What man of common intelligence could resist 
such evidence ? First, there is the testimony of the 
passenger who nursed Wilkins, and of the captain and 
all the crew that they saw these flying people ; that es- 
tablishes beyond all question the fact of their existence. 
And, then, there is Wilkin s's account of his residence 
among them for years, bearing all the evidences of a 
plain, calm, simple statement of a conscientious, truthful 
man, in the very face of death. I believe it so strongly 
that I intend to exert my great influence with Congress, 



46 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

at this very session, to send out exploring expeditions to 
every part of the globe to hunt for them.* What a 
poor thing the finding of Sir John Franklin's bones 
would be to the glory of discovering and introducing to 
the world such a people ! And if I can't prevail upon 
the Government to do it, I think, as soon as I make 
money enough by my lectures and from the sale of my 
books, I will fit out one myself. It is only lately that I 
have thought much about it ; and since I have been 
thinking of it I have wondered why none of our explor- 
ing exj^editions have not found them, or at least some 
traces of them, for it may be possible that they have 
flown off to some other planet, though it is my impres- 
sion that they inhabit that beautiful country and delight- 
ful climate which, Symmes says, exist at the North Pole ; 
which I formerly thought one of the vagaries of a wild 
enthusiast, but now think it more than likely that his 
opinion is correct. 

Friend. Now, look here, Colonel, did you ever meet 
any sensible man who looked upon that Peter Wilkins 
story as anything else than an interesting fiction ? 

Colonel. Well, I can't say I did ; and, to tell the truth, 
I must confess that 1 considered it in the same light my- 
self when I read it, but then we were all in a state of 
great ignorance ; we had not reached the exalted plat- 
form of intelligence upon which we now stand ; especially, 



* I see that a bill has been introduced in Congress to appropriate 
money for another Arctic expedition. Was this done through Col. 
Ingersoll's influence ? and is the object to search for his flving peo- 
ple ? 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 47 

I had not made the grand discovery that "nature, without 
passion and without intention, forms, transforms, and re- 
transforms forever," nor the still grander one that I 
and Shakespeare, instead of descending from that old 
rascal Adam, who was mean enough to lay all the blame 
on his wife, have come up from the good honest "skul- 
less vertebrates in the dim Laurentian seas, vertebrates 
wiggling without knowing why they wiggled, and swim- 
ming without knowing where they were going." 

Friend. But I thought you didn't believe in miracles. 

Colonel. Believe in miracles ! of course, I don't. I 
believe in nothing outside of nature, for "beyond nature 
man cannot go, even in thought — above nature he cannot 
rise — below nature he cannot fall." But that human be- 
ings should have wings is entirely within the range of the 
power of nature to "form, transform and retransform." 
Haven't I just told you that I and Shakespeare came up 
from the "skulless vertebrates in the dim Laurentian 
seas ? " And if nature can from a thing without arms or 
hands or feet, make such men as me and Shakespeare, and 
especially such grand intellects as mine and his, just think 
how trifling a matter it would be to add a couple of 
wings, which would make us so much more perfect and 
give us so much more power. 



CHAPTEE XL 

It is only since I have made these grand discoveries 
of the powers of nature that I have thought much of 
the great blessing it would be to the human race to 
have wings, and with how little trouble nature could 
confer it. This recalled to me the recollection of 
Peter Wilkins's account of those flying people. Know- 
ing that what nature has done once she can do again, 
I concluded that, though I might be too old for her 
to do perfect work, yet, by "helping nature" a little, 
as the doctors say, she might make me a pair of little 
wings, and if I could get a pair, no matter how small, I 
I could set her to work on younger people, and, having 
once got her to work in that line, she would soon become 
perfect, and being sole possessor of the means of control- 
ling her, I would have her out to make wings for other 
people, as Redpath did me to lecture, with this difference: 
that I would get all the money. So I went and bought 
me two bottles of St. Jacob's Oil and a yard of the finest 
flesh-colored silk oil-cloth that I could find, that being 
nearer, than anything I could think of, like the material 
of which I supposed the wings were made, from which I 
cut two small wings, and pasted the end of one on each of 
my shoulders, just byway of intimating to nature what 
I wanted done, and giving her a little aid by furnishing 
her a little raw material to start with, knowing that she 
48 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 49 

could " transform and re transform " it to suit herself ; and 
by way of rendering her a little further aid in the start 
I rubbed my shoulders every night and morning with St. 
Jacob's Oil. But the experiment came yery near being 
fatal to me. One night, when I had indulged jn one of my 
grandest flights of imagination, some fellow out in the 
hall, carried away, as I afterwards found, by his enthu- 
siasm, cried out, "Gro it, Colonel ! you are spreading your 
wings now/"' I came yery near sinking down in my 
tracks, for it flashed across me that somehow the fellow 
had found out that I was cultivating wings, and intended 
to expose me before the crowd ; but I recovered myself 
in an instant, and I don't think anybody perceived the 
effect it had produced upon me. 

But to return. I had used up my two bottles of St. 
Jacob's Oil and had bought and used up four more, with 
little or no eflect that I could perceive ; and I was about 
to conclude that nature was playing me false, and to give 
the thing up as a hopeless job, when, in my investigations 
into the secrets of nature, I was fortunate enough, not long 
since, to discover the ingredients and proportions of Dr. 
Kamrod's Celebrated Tincture of Gridiron. This wonder- 
ful tincture had in the last century a world-wide reputa- 
tion, and there were then, and may perhaps yet be found 
in some of the old books, numerous accounts of what the 
people in their ignorance then considered its miraculous 
effects; but in my investigations I have discovered that it 
is simply one of nature's agents by which she "forms, 
transforms, and retransforms." Two of the cases men- 
tioned as very miraculous I remember : one was a man 
who had fallen from a window upon a large undershot 



50 MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 

mill-wheel in rapid motion, and being carried between the 
wheel and the house, was thrown into the stream below 
crushed out of all proportion. There happened to be a 
man present with a vial of Doctor Bamrod's Tincture of 
Gridiron in his pocket, which he immediately emptied 
into the stream, and the man walked out sound and whole, 
with no inconvenience but his wet clothing. In the other 
case, some men were out boating, when one of them fell 
into the water ; as his companions were drawing him in, 
a shark bit off one of his legs just below the knee ; he 
seemed to be bleeding to death, when one of them, re- 
membering that he had a vial of the tincture in his 
pocket, applied it ; the bleeding stopped instantly, and 
before they reached the land the man's leg was as perfect 
and sound as ever. 

Such cases as these appear to the ignorant to be what 
are called miracles, when, in truth, they are perfectly 
natural, and occur much more frequently than they sup- 
pose. The elements of this tincture exist in abundance, 
and from causes which I am investigating, but have not 
yet been able to discover, they exist in some particular 
localities in superabundance. Whenever any accident 
happens in one of these places, no injury results from it. 
For example, we see a man fall from a third or fourth 
story of a house to a stone pavement and get up and 
walk off as if nothing had happened. Now there is no 
doubt that half of the bones in his body were broken, but 
it happened to be one of those places where there was 
great superabundance of the elements of the tincture, and 
nature applied them the instant he touched the ground, 
and restored everything before he or anybody else had 



MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. 51 

time to see that lie had sustained any injury. As to the leg, 
we know that some of the lower forms of animal life, 
when they lose a leg, haye a new one restored; the lobster, 
when he loses one of his claws, instinctively seeks and 
employs it and gets a new claw; but in these cases, as it is 
in a diluted form, longer time is required to do the work. 
In the higher forms it requires a more condensed form. 
In fact, it is the agent by which nature brought me and 
Shakespeare up from "the skulless vertebrates of the 
dim Laurentian seas." To prove to you the marvelous 
power of this element, I saw recently, in the Washington 
Post, an account taken from a St. Louis paper of a man, 
by the name of Dick Sullivan, who had a few weeks before 
fallen sixty feet from the top of a house on a stone pave- 
ment, and was then walking about on his crutches. Now, 
there is no doubt that this man was mashed into a jelly, 
but nature immediately applied this element before he 
or anybody else discovered his condition. But unfortu- 
nately there was not quite enough of it to restore so very 
bad a case, and I suppose there was one of his legs, or 
perhaps only one of his feet, that was not entirely 
restored. 



CHAPTER Xn. 

What an incalculable amount of suffering would have 
been saved to the world if old Ramrod had possessed 
enough of the milk of human kindness to reveal his 
secret before he died ! But, thanks to nature, she has at 
last yielded up her secret to me, and I will not follow his 
example; for, after I have made money enough out of it 
for myself, I will give it to the world, or at least so arrange 
that the world shall have it after my death, that is, pro- 
vided I ever die, for I am not sure but it may make me 
immortal. As I told you, I have but recently made the 
discovery, and have made only enough for my own use; I 
have applied it to my shoulders but three times, and 
already I have some strange sensations, which I think in- 
dicate the formation of new bones and muscles ; in facir, 
I believe my wings are sprouting, and I have no doubt 
that in a week I shall have a pair of pretty little wings, 
and perhaps nature may make them large enough to en- 
able me to fly; and then won't I astonish the world ! 

And what a pity it is that I did not discover it before 
the war ! Just think what an incalculable benefit I would 
have conferred upon the country and what glory I would 
have acquired for myself ! Instead of foolishly going off 
coloneling, and letting that rascally rebel Ned Forest 
catch and send me off home like a whipped school-boy 
caught stealing apples, I would have made up a large 
52 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 53 

quantity of it and gone with our army to the first battle 
of Manassas, and when one of our boys was mangled by a 
shell, or shot down, or had a leg or an arm shot off, I 
would just have applied a few drops to him, and he would 
have gone on fighting just the same. Of course we 
should haye exterminated the whole rebel army and closed 
the war at once, instead of permitting them, as Bob 
Toombs says, to take four years to wear themselves out 
whipping us. 

In truth, I am now satisfied that they had a knowledge 
of this or something like it to help them. For upon no 
other hypothesis can it be accounted for that a people so 
utterly sunk in barbarism and ignorance, in every way so 
generally inferior to us, not more than one third of our 
number, as compared with us almost destitute of the im- 
plements, munitions, and appliances of war, shut out 
from intercourse and aid and sympathy of the whole 
world, while we had its aid and sympathy, and com- 
manded and led by officers immeasurably inferior to ours, 
should, as Bob Toombs said, have actually worn themselves 
out whipping us. And that even with all these advan- 
tages on our side, they would, as Lincoln said, have worn 
us out, but for the help we received from the niggers. 
You may depend upon it they had a knowledge of this, 
or something like it, and used it. 

Nor have I any doubt that it was known to a few 
thousands of years ago. All the stories about that fellow 
Achilles being made invulnerable everywhere but in the 
heel, by which his mother held him when she dipped him 
into the river of Styx, are mere bosh. He had no doubt 
been wounded very often, but hisr mother had somehow 



54 MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 

possessed herself of this element, and when he went to 
the Trojan war she supplied him with a large quantity of 
it in a very condensed form ; and whenever he was 
wounded, he immediately applied a drop or two, and of 
course nobody knew he had ever been even scratched, 
and therefore concluded that he was invulnerable. But 
when that cowardly dandy, Paris, went to shoot him, he was 
in such a hurry, and so badly scared, that he couldn't take 
good aim, and just happened to hit him in the heel. The 
truth is, that his supply had given out, or, more probably, 
as he had fallen in love and had gone off to treat for his 
marriage with Paris's sister, he either forgot to take any of 
the element with him, or didn't think it necessary. Paris 
shot him with a poisoned arrow, and would have killed 
him just as well if he had struck him anywhere else. But, 
as he had always been held to be invulnerable, and was 
killed by a wound in the heel, they accounted for it by 
trumping up that river of Styx story. 



CHAPTEE XIII. 

But this grand discovery will give me a power which 
I value even more than that of making wings. 

Friend. Well, lack-a-day, Colonel ! you astonish me 
more and more. Do tell me what you can consider more 
valuable than wings. 

Colonel. And so I will ; but as you are the only living 
soul to whom I would tell it, you must say nothing about it, 
for if it should get out, and I should fail, I should never 
hear the last of it, and it would make me ridiculous. And 
though ridicule is my strongest weapon, yet if I were 
subjected to it myself, it would sting me to death. The 
preachers, as you know, have charged me with every- 
thing wicked and devilish ; but I don't mind that ; I 
rather like it, and think it helps me, because everybody 
knows that I am a good fellow, and in many respects 
better than many of them ; but if I should make myself 
a fit subject for ridicule, everybody, even my best friends, 
would join in the laugh against me ; they couldn't help 
it, and, jiminy ! how my enemies would exult and tri- 
umph ! I couldn't stand it. 

Well, you know that for years, from pure motives of 
patriotism and philanthropy, I have labored hard and 
made great sacrifices in my efforts to liberate the world 
from the abject and degrading slavery to which it has 

55 



56 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

been subjected, and in which it is held by that horrible 
offspring of ignorance and superstition, the belief in a 
God and the Christian religion. I thought at one time 
that I was on the high-road to success. The crowd 
flocked by hundreds and thousands to my lectures, paid 
their half-dollars freely, and cheered and applauded me 
to the echo. Not only the masses, but the money power 
of the country appeared to be with me. Bankers, manu- 
facturers, and railroad men were all delighted with, and 
honored me. But, strange to say, I couldn't be Governor 
of Illinois. Last year, I left my usual course and exerted 
my great powers in the support of Garfield for President, 
and by denouncing the South as everything that is base 
and infamous, and charging everything that was low and 
mean to the Democrats, and claiming for the Eepublican 
party everything that ever had been done that was good 
or creditable, I have no doubt that I secured his election, 
and felt that I was entitled to at least one of the best 
foreign missions, and had no doubt that I would get it. 
But I found that I had less, or my enemies more, strength 
than I had calculated, for though Garfield patted me on 
the back, and called me Royal Bob, he dared not give me 
the appointment; nor has Arthur given me one. My 
failure to get one of the best appointments in the gift of 
the Government, I attribute entirely to the influence of 
what is called the religious sentiment of the country ; in 
other words, the power of the Church, which is the 
power of the priesthood. 

You can scarcely imagine, though you may form a faint 
conception of, the happiness it would afford me to be able 
to turn these gentry, who preach to silks, laces, and jew- 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 57 

elry every Sunday for ten or fifteen thousand dollars a 
year, out to make a living by honest work, which I be- 
lieve I shall be able to do. 

You know that the whole fabric of the Christian reli- 
gion is based upon and supported by what are called "the 
miracles" said to have been performed by Christ and 
his apostles. Now this grand discovery of mine, when I 
get it in its perfection, will enable me to demonstrate that 
these pretended miracles are simply the operations of some 
of nature's laws which she has not generally revealed, and 
when I do this the whole structure 

Will melt into air, into thin air, 

And, like the baseless fabric of a Tision, 

Leave not a rack behind. — Shakespeare. 

This man Christ, according to the accounts given of 
him, was unquestionably an extraordinary man. He must 
have been very nearly equal to me or Shakespeare. At 
twelve years of age he excited the astonishment of the 
people by his wisdom in disputing with the Doctors in 
the Temple as much as I did in disputing with the minis- 
ter in Cleveland at the same age. 

From that time we hear nothing of him until he was 
" beginning to be about thirty years of age." It is claimed 
that he was working at the carpenter's trade with his re- 
puted father, but I find no evidence of it. He was cer- 
tainly a good, pure, and patriotic man ; and it is my 
opinion that, disgusted with the moral corruption and the 
political degradation of his people, he secluded himself 
from public view and devoted his great talents to working 
out some plan by which he might lift his people from 



58 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

their moral corruption and make them again a great and 
controlling nation. In the mean time, in his solitude and 
seclusion, he must have come much in contact with na- 
ture, and his great genius enabled him, as mine has me, 
to discover the great life-giving element of nature, with 
this difference : that he either found it in, or brought it 
to, its perfection and greatest strength, which I have not 
yet done, but doubt not I shall be able to do. 

Being a Jew, he knew that any attempt to enlighten 
and reform his people would be useless, unless he could 
convince them that he was armed with the power and 
authority of what they called their God. To convince 
them of this, he went about preaching the highest and 
purest morality, and, by what apj>eared to be a miraculous 
power, healing the sick (which his disciples called casting 
out devils) and raising the dead, which he claimed to do 
by the power and authority of their God. 

While he made quite a considerable number of converts, 
he found he was producing but little effect upon the 
Jews as a nation. Being a great enthusiast and willing 
to suffer for the benefit of his people, it occurred to him 
that if he were to die and rise from the dead it would at 
once force conviction of his divine mission upon the whole 
people. Accordingly, he announced that such would be 
the case ; and through Joseph of Arimathea, and Nico- 
demus, a ruler of the Jews, the arrangement was made 
with Pilate that he should be publicly crucified. It is 
clear that the thing was a put-up job, for there was 
nothing in the charges against him.wliicli could justify 
a Roman governor in authorizing a mob to put him to 
death, as Pilate himself admitted. 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 59 

To guard against any mistake or failure, it was arranged, 
too, that Joseph should place the body in his own sepulchre, 
and that he and Nicodemus, supplied with the life-giv- 
ing element, should restore him to life. For you remem- 
ber that it is said that Nicodemus came with a mixture 
of myrrh and aloes, and he and JosejDh wrapped them 
with the body in fine linen and laid it in the sepulchre. 
There is no doubt that there and then they restored him 
to life. After that, all was easy. When at the proper 
time he rolled away the stone at the door of the sepul- 
chre to come out, the guards placed as a watch were 
of course scared nearly to death, and doubtless ran 
away. 

As to his appearing to his disciples and disappearing at 
pleasure, and his going up into heaven, he had commenced 
preparing for that as soon as he conceived the idea. By 
the use of this wonderful element of nature he had, 
as I am now doing, grown himself a good pair of wings, 
with which he could fly like an eagle. He had, of course, 
known of what Lycurgus did, when, after having pre- 
pared the Spartans a good code of laws, he made them 
swear to observe them until he returned from a journey 
he was about to take. So Christ enjoined on his disci- 
ples to obey his commandments until he should return. 
Then he flew away, and we hear no more of him. 
I have not the least doubt that he went to that far-off 
country and established the flying people, of which 
Peter Wilkins gave the account, of which I have told 
you. 

As soon as my wings grow out and I have got the ele- 
ment in its perfection and most condensed form, I shall 



60 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

succeed in raising the dead, and then the whole Christian 
superstition will disappear like a bursted soap-bubble, my 
popularity will be unbounded, and I shall be absolute 
ruler of the country, and, perhaps, of the whole world. 
"What do you think of it ? 

Friend. Well, Colonel, I must confess that I have lis- 
tened to you with increasing astonishment from beginning 
to end, and all that I have to say is, that I am something 
like old George W. Moore, when the Justice of the Peace 
made what he considered an outrageous decision against 
him. Old George kept what in those days was called a 
tavern ; it is now called hotel. As was the general cus- 
tom, there was planted before his door a post, fifteen or 
twenty feet high, with a frame on top, in which there was 
swung a sign-board, with his name painted in large letters 
on both sides, so that it could be seen by a traveler aj)- 
proaching from either end of the road. There was no 
gas in those days, and lamps were scarce, so that the main 
reliance for light was upon tallow candles and pine knots ; 
of course there were no lights hung in the streets before 
the doors. 

One among others of old George's peculiarities was, 
that, no matter what he was going to say, he invariably 
commenced with the word "merely." One dark, rainy 
night a traveler rode up and called, and upon George's 
going to the door, asked, " Who keeps this tavern ? " 
George replied, " Merely, just cast up your eyes and you 
will see George W. Moore, in full." — "As I have not the 
eyes of a cat," returned the traveler, " I will save myself 
the trouble of casting them up, and get out of this rain 
as quickly as possible." 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 61 

From his invariable and indiscriminate use of the term, 
it came to pass in the course of time that in speaking of 
him his neighbors used the name "Old Merely/' almost 
to the entire exclusion of his real name ; but to him and 
the Justice of the Peace. 



CHAPTEK XIV. 

It happened, and a thing that very rarely happened, 
that he had a case in which the Justice of the Peace made 
against him a decision, at which he felt so outraged that, 
though not much given to profanity, he blurted out, 
" Merely, it is my opinion that this Court is a damphool." 
The Court : "Mr. Moore, you are fined ten dollars." 
Moore : " Merely, that just confirms me in my opinion." 
This was told and repeated as a good joke upon old 
George, until " Merely that just confirms me in my opin- 
ion " got to be a very common reply. 

There was in the same county a circuit judge of marked 
ability, who presided with great dignity, and sometimes 
with something of austerity. He had a younger brother, 
a lawyer, who practiced in his courts. He was, like you, 
named Bob, and was noted for his wit and dry humor. 
"Upon the occasion of the trial of an important case, in 
which Bob had argued some law point with great earnest- 
ness and zeal, the judge decided against him, upon which, 
he arose, and, with great gravity of manner, remarked, 
" Merely, it is my opinion that this Court " — everybody, 
of course, knew that Bob would not finish the sentence 
after the manner of old George ; he, no doubt, intended 
to amuse the crowd, by showing how adroitly he could 
convey the whole meaning, without the use of an offensive 
word. But the judge, taken by surprise, and incensed 
62 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 63 

by what he considered a purpose to insult the Court, or 
anxious to saye his brother from placing himself in a 
position which would necessarily subject him to some 
punishment, perhaps both, interrupted him in his stern- 
est tones, with "Finish that sentence, sir, and I'll send 
you to jail." But the judge would have done better not 
to have been in such haste, for Bob, with one of his 
blandest smiles and most graceful bows, instantly replied, 
"May it please the Court, merely, that just confirms me 
in my opinion." This convulsed the court with laughter, 
even the judge could not repress a smile, even though at 
his own expense, for he, in common with everybody else, 
saw at once how completely his haste had enabled Bob to 
get in the whole idea, without the least tangible discour- 
tesy to the Court. 

And after my long yarn about George and the Justice of 
the Peace, now for the application. I told you more than 
an hour ago that in my opinion you were either crazy or 
a natural-born fool ; and now, after hearing all you have 
said, all that I have to say is "merely, that just confirms 
me in my opinion." 



CHAPTEK XV. 

Extkayagant and preposterously absurd as these 
things may appear, it cannot be denied that they are the 
legitimate and logical deductions from Colonel Ingersoll's 
theories of the "forming, transforming, and retransform- 
ing power " of nature, or that there is in them nothing 
more absurd than he has, in so many words, advocated. 
Leaving him to nurse his wings and prepare for his work 
of exploding Christianity by raising the dead, I will re- 
sume, as the preachers say, the thread of my discourse. 

Col. Ingersoll might make a much stronger case in favor 
of his hypothesis and his theories, if it were not for the 
existence of our earth. But, unfortunately for him, it does 
exist, and being within our reach, we are enabled to find 
upon it and in it much of the known from which to reason 
to the unknown in support of our hypothesis, while if he 
attempts to reason at all, he must reason from the un- 
known in support of his ; which means no reasoning at 
all. Still more unfortunately for him, science, which he 
professes to worship so devoutly, and upon which he, 
with " that unhapjiy mixture of insanity and ignorance 
called faith," so blindly relies for support, comes in, and, 
dissipating with one wave of its wand all the mists and 
fogs in which he has enveloped himself, leaves him not 
an inch of ground upon which to stand. 

In one of his lucid intervals Col. Ingersoll appears to 
64 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 65 

have caught a glimpse of this difficulty, when he said : 
" The Church teaches that this world and all that it con- 
tains were created substantially as we now see them ; that 
the grasses, the flowers, the trees, and all animals were 
special creations, and that they sustain no necessary rela- 
tion to each other." 

And what does the reader suppose he offers as proof of 
the incorrectness of this opinion ? He says : ' l The most 
orthodox will admit that some earth has been washed into 
the sea ; that the sea has encroached a little upon the 
land, and that some mountains may be a trifle lower than 
in the morning of creation." 

It is as though, upon visiting a house he had not seen 
for many years, Col. Ingersoll should assert that it was 
not, substantially, the same house, and should offer us an 
argument in proof of his assertion, that it was admitted 
that the paint had been rubbed off in a few places, and 
that a few panes of glass had been broken out of the 
windows. What opinion must people of common sense 
entertain of an intellect which can consider such stuff 
sound argument ? or of the honesty of a man one remove 
from idiotcy, who should attempt to impose it as such 
upon others, whom he was proposing, from motives of 
benevolence and philanthropy, to enlighten as to the 
truth on a matter of vital importance ? 

When Col. Ingersoll put forth such stuff as an argu- 
ment, he had clearly relapsed into his normal condition, 
and proceeded : " The theory of gradual development was 
unknown to our fathers ; the idea of evolution did not 
occur to them. Our fathers looked upon the then 
arrangement of things as the primal arrangement. The 



6Q MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

earth appeared to them fresh from the hands of a deity. 
They knew nothing of the slow evolutions of countless 
years, but supposed that the almost infinite variety of 
vegetable and animal forms had existed from the first." 

After two pages more to prove that God was a very 
poor architect, and at best very bad, he says : " What 
would we think of a father who should give a farm to his 
children, and before giving them possession, should plant 
upon it thousands of deadly shrubs and vines; should stock 
it with ferocious beasts and poisonous reptiles ; should 
take pains to put a few swamps in the neighborhood to 
breed malaria; should so arrange matters that the ground 
would occasionally open and swallow a few of his darlings; 
and besides all this, should establish a few volcanoes in 
the immediate vicinity that might at any moment over- 
whelm his children with rivers of fire ? Suppose that 
this father neglected to tell his children which of the 
plants were deadly ; that the reptiles were poisonous ; 
fail to say anything about the earthquakes, and kept the 
volcano business a secret — would we pronounce him 
angel or fiend ? And yet this is exactly what the ortho- 
dox God has done." 

Well, what of it ? Suppose he did ? It proves nothing, 
but that he is not a kind father. But the question un- 
der discussion is not whether he is "an angel or a fiend," 
but whether he is G-od of Creation. The truth is that 
Col. Ingersoll is as mad as a March hare, and as crazy 
as a bed-bug. With his usual recklesness, he asserts Avhat 
never has been, and never can be proven. There is no 
evidence that God did not impart to man the knowledge 
of what shrubs and reptiles were poisonous. Whatever 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 67 

evidence there is, is exactly the other way. As to the 
earthquakes and volcanoes, I don't see that there was any 
great use for it, so far as the knowledge we haye of them 
is of any use to us. With his usual blindness and habit 
of self-contradiction, he asserts that God did all these 
things as proof, not only that he did not do them, but 
that he does not exist. That beats Guiteau and the plea 
in the chaise case, where the man said the chaise was 
broken when he borrowed it, that it was sound when he 
returned it, and lastly, that he had never had it at all. 



CHAPTEE XVI. 

Science has demonstrated that there was a time in the 
history of our earth when neither vegetable nor animal 
life did or could exist. Yet, as far back as human 
knowledge can reach, we find it teeming with both. How 
did they get here ? They must have come either by crea- 
tion by some superior power, which is the only rational 
hypothesis, or by some mysterious process, unexplained, 
inexplicable, and without a shadow of support from 
"positive evidence, analogy, or experience, without 
which," Col. Ingersoll says, "argument is simply im- 
possible, and, at the very best, can amount only to a 
useless agitation of the air." Yet one of these plans we 
are compelled to adopt by "that unhappy mixture of in- 
sanity and ignorance called faith," and which he so often 
denounces as the essence of slavery. It is the office of 
reason to examine and determine which of these two plans 
furnishes the best foundation for "faith." 

The great majority of mankind has adopted the first ; 
Col. Ingersoll, rejecting with scorn the idea of creation, 
and seeing the necessity of accounting for the existence 
of vegetable and animal life on the earth, summons 
what he calls nature to his aid, and, while denying to 
her the power to create, invests her with greater powers 
than are necessary for the creation of matter, by assuming 
that she has, "without intention," worked mere dead, 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 69 

inert, unintelligent matter into life and intellect ; I will 
not say soul, because lie does not believe in such a thing. 

I propose to examine some of what he may consider 
his arguments against creation ; though there is neces- 
sarily very little to do in that line, as he has, inadvertently 
perhaps, acknowledged the worthlessness of his principal 
stock in trade when he said, in reply to Judge Black, 
' ( The mind of every thoughtful man is forced to one of 
these two conclusions : either that the universe is self- 
existent, or that it was created by a self-existent being." 
For it may be admitted that the God of Creation is cruel 
and tyrannical, and created men purely for the pleasure 
of inflicting pain and misery upon them, without furnish- 
ing any evidence that He did not create the universe ; 
in proof of which these charges constitute the staple of 
what Col. Ingersoll calls his arguments. 

He seems, then, to be settled in the opinion that he 
came up from the lower animals. Perhaps he has some 
inner consciousness which informs him as to the race to 
which he belongs, as he says, ' ' Man cannot conceive of 
anything utterly unlike what he has seen or felt." He 
has doubtless seen many monkeys ; it is not likely that he 
ever saw one changed into a man, but he may, for aught 
that I know, feel some of the monkey in him, and may, 
therefore, conceive that he belongs to that tribe. How 
many he has succeeded, or will succeed, in convincing 
that he "came up" from the lower animals, I cannot 
guess, but it is my opinion, as I have said, that his lec- 
tures will convince multitudes that if he did not come up 
from them, he is rapidly gravitating down to them ; and, 
perhaps, it is of little consequence by what means he shall 



70 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

establish the kinship of which he seems to be so 
proud. 

He does not tell us how the lower animals originated, 
and if he attempts it, he finds science dead against him. 
Science tells us that, according to nature, there is neither 
vegetable nor animal life without a preexistent parent ; 
it also tells us that this earth was, for an unknown 
period, a molten mass ; heat that liquefies rocks and 
metals, dissipates all organic matter, and destroys all life, 
vegetable and animal. Whence, then, was this earth 
supplied with vegetable and animal life ? There is no 
answer to this but that they were created by God, the 
father and maker of all. 

I have said, that when it is admitted that there was a 
time when neither vegetable nor animal life did or could 
exist upon the earth, Col. Ingersoll has nothing of the 
known from which to reason in support of his assertion 
that what he calls nature has produced all or any of 
the vegetable and animal life that now exists ; and, with- 
out that, there is no escape from the conclusion that they 
were all created by a power superior to nature. 

Col. Ingersoll ought at least to have furnished us with 
some proof as to the means by which that skulless verte- 
brate from which he thinks he and Shakespeare sprung 
came into existence. But he didn't; and in all the flights 
of his imagination I have not found anything like an argu- 
ment, founded upon " positive evidence, analogy, or ex- 
perience," to prove that what he calls nature can produce 
animal or vegetable life ; and until he can prove that, 
by the clearest evidence, it is vain to deny the existence 
of a ^ power superior to nature." Of course, he is abun- 



MISTAKES OP INGEKSOLL. 71 

dant in his assertions of her power. He says, for exam- 
ple, " Beyond nature man cannot go, even in thought — 
above nature he cannot rise — below nature he cannot fall." 
A very pretty set of words, but my intellect is too obtuse 
to understand what he means by them, unless it is that 
no one man can be any better or worse than any other 
man, and that, therefore, Washington and Arnold, Gar- 
field and G-uiteau, stand upon the same plane. If that 
is what he means, the assertion is true, provided some 
others that he makes are true, as I shall show hereafter. 



CHAPTEE XYII. 

Let us examine now some of his attempts at what he 
considers reasoning. He says, " Every effect must have 
had a cause, and every cause must have been an effect ; 
therefore, there could have been no first cause." But, 
he says, "• matter existed from eternity." Now, upon 
his own showing, here is an " effect without a cause." 
Now, if matter existed from eternity, it existed without 
a cause ; and if, as Col. Ingersoll contends, everything, 
even to intellect, sprung from it under the manipulation 
of nature, it must be the " first cause." 

Let us take another example, premising that he never 
hesitates to assert anything when it suits his present pur- 
pose, and to deny it when it suits another. He says, 
"Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there is 
no being superior to nature, and that matter and force 
have existed from eternity. Now, suppose that two atoms 
should come together, would there be an effect ? Yes. 
Suppose they came in exactly opposite directions with 
equal force, they would be stopped, to say the least." 
Stop here, Col. Ingersoll, yourself. If they were stopped 
for even the smallest conceivable length of time they 
would be in a state of rest. Yet, on the very next page 
you say, " In the whole universe there is not even one 
atom in a state of rest." He proceeds : "This would be 
an effect. If this be so, then you have matter, force, 
72 



MISTAKES OP INGEESOLL. 73 

and effect, without a being superior to nature. Now, 
suppose that two other atoms, just like the first two — " 
Stop, again : this is not a supposable thing, for you say, 
" Do we not know that there are no two persons alike in 
the whole world ? No two trees, no two leaves ; no two 
anythings that are alike ? " We will finish the sentence 
— " should come together under precisely the same circum- 
stances, would not the effect be exactly the same ? Yes. 
Like cause producing like effects is what we mean by law 
and order. Then, we have matter, force, effect, law, 
and order, without a being superior to nature." Now, we 
know that e ' every effect must also be a cause, and that 
every cause must be an effect." We know no such thing, 
for it is not true. Whatever effect is produced by any 
cause is due entirely to that cause, and when the effect is 
fully accomplished it is at an end ; other causes may 
come in and, operating upon the effect already produced, 
may produce other effects, but the first effect is simply a 
result and not a cause. I extinguish my lamp, and it 
causes darkness in my room ; the cause and the effect are 
both at an end ; the darkness causes nothing. I supply 
a given amount of heat to a piece of iron, upon which it 
produces certain effects ; when they are fully accomplished 
they are at an end, and the iron, if kept at the same tem- 
perature, will, so far as we know anything of physical 
laws, remain in the same condition to eternity unless 
some other cause be brought to operate upon it. 

But he proceeds : "The atoms coming together did 

produce an effect, and as every effect must also be a cause, 

the effect produced by the collision of the atoms must, as 

to something else, have been a cause. Then we have 

4 



74 MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 

matter, force, law, order, cause, and effect, without a 
being superior to nature. Nothing is left for the super- 
natural but empty space." 

Did ever any sane man attempt to foist upon people of 
common sense such a jumble of nonsense as sound reason- 
ing, or indeed as reasoning of any sort ? I see that 
Guiteau says his head bulges very much to one side. I 
suppose that accounts for it. In his reply to Judge 
Black, he says : " It will not do to prove your premises 
by assertions and then claim that your conclusions are 
correct because they agree with your premises." Col. 
Ingersoll does more than that. He first assumes the 
thing that he is required to prove. Then he assumes 
several things which he supposes might happen provided 
his first assumption is correct, several of which he has 
denied on other occasions ; yet he has furnished no evi- 
dence that any of them would happen, nor any reason 
why they should. Admitting that they all might happen, 
provided there were "no being superior to nature," all 
that it could prove is that they might happen, provided 
there is "no being superior to nature," without furnish- 
ing a shadow of either evidence or argument against the 
existence of such a being. 

ISTo wonder that his " head bulges out very much one 
side." Such drivel and nonsense and so much of it is 
enough to make any head " bulge to one side," especially 
if it is a little soft. Whether the drivel and nonsense are 
attributable to the bulge, or the bulge to them, I will not 
undertake to determine. 



CHAPTEE XVIII. 

Ie we had nothing but dead, inert, unintelligent matter 
to guide us it would be impossible for the human intellect 
to determine whether the universe existed from eternity, 
or was created by a self -existent being. It is true, there 
is in the greatness and grandeur of the universe, and in 
the evidence of intelligent design, strong testimony in 
favor of the latter ; but all this might be met, as it is, by 
the assertion, that all this is the work of nature. 

But science, upon which Col. Ingersoll professes to 
rely with such implicit faith for the final destruction of 
the idea of a God of Creation, has raised up against athe- 
ism obstacles which it is impossible to surmount. We 
have no means of knowing when the universe began to 
exist, nor when this earth was formed ; but science has 
brought to us incontestable evidence that in the history 
of the existence of our earth there was a time when there 
was upon it neither vegetable nor animal life, and when 
neither could by any possibility exist . We know, there- 
fore, that these had a beginning, and that they could not 
have been produced, or rather created, by any of what we 
know as the operations of nature. It follows, therefore, 
of necessity, that they must have been created ; and crea- 
tion is omnipotence ; and unless they can prove that 
what they call nature has produced these things, the 
question is settled. 

75 



76 MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 

Col. Ingersoll says, "Nature is but an endless series of 
efficient causes ; she cannot create, but she eternally trans- 
forms. There was no beginning, and there can be no 
end. " But we know there was a beginning of animal and 
vegetable life. 

Further, he says, "Nature, so far as we can discern, 
without passion and without intention, forms, transforms, 
and retransforms forever. She neither weejos nor rejoices. 
She produces man without purpose, and obliterates with- 
out regret. She knows no distinction between the bene- 
ficial and the hurtful. Poison and nutrition, pain and 
joy, life and death, smiles and tears are alike to her ; she 
is neither merciful nor cruel. She cannot be flattered by 
worship, nor melted by tears. She does not know even 
the attitude of prayer. She appreciates no difference 
between the poison in the fangs of snakes and mercy in 
the hearts of men." 

A very nice gathering of antitheses ; a pretty stringing 
together of words without sense or meaning. It gives us 
no idea of what nature is. Just read over carefully Col. 
Ingersoll's enunciation of the character and action of the 
nature he has made, and see if you can extract from it a 
particle of sense. It would be just as sensible to say, "A 
stick or a stone, so far as we can discern, without passion 
and without intention, forms, transforms, and retrans- 
forms forever. It neither weeps nor rejoices," etc. 

"We hear a great deal about " the laws of nature, the 
works of nature," etc. These are very convenient terms 
to draw the mind of man away from the recognition and 
contemplation of the power and wisdom of God, and to 
rob Him of His glory. But there are no such things. 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 77 

Nature never made a law, nor did any work. God makes 
all the laws and does all the work through those laws. 
He has impressed his laws upon all matter, these laws 
govern and control it, are the important part of its being, 
form its distinctive characteristics, and make it what it is. 

In the creation of vegetable life, He made it the law of 
its being that it should produce roots, stems, leaves and 
flowers, and seed to reproduce itself "after its kind." 
Perhaps we had as well call these results the "nature" 
of vegetable life as any other name ; but here are evi- 
dences of "intention," which prove that they are not 
the work of Col. IngersolPs "nature," which "without 
passion and without intention, forms, transforms, and 
retransforms forever." 

In the creation of animal life He incorporated into it 
laws which constitute the essence of its being, and with- 
out which it could not be what it is. These laws con- 
stitute and maintain the identity of all the various forms 
of animal life, and point to and provide for the manner 
of the life He intended for each to pursue and enjoy. 

Col. Ingersoll perceives no evidence of intention in the 
law which covers with hair or wool or fur those animals 
that live upon land, and covers with feathers and provides 
with wings those which move in the air, and in both cases 
makes the covering heavier in winter and lighter in summer. 

These laws, incorporated into and constituting the 
being of animal and vegetable life, are the laws which 
God has made " absolute, eternal, and inexorable." And 
it is because He has made these laws "absolute, eternal, 
and inexorable," and has given man the ability to dis- 
cover what they are, and that this is their " nature," that 



78 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

we are enabled to live. We know that God has made it the 
"absolute, eternal, and inexorable law "of the existence 
of wheat that it shall produce wheat. We know, there- 
fore, that when we sow wheat we shall, by the operation 
Ji this " absolute, eternal law," get wheat in return. 

Knowing these laws, which God has impressed upon all 
matter as a part of its being, and knowing that they are 
" absolute, eternal, and inexorable," we can avail ourselves 
of them in ways without number for our benefit. But 
suppose we had to rely upon Col. IngersolPs nature, 
which, "without intention, forms, transforms, and re trans- 
forms forever," we must always move in darkness and 
uncertainty. We might sow wheat, and " nature" might 
so " transform and retransform " it as to produce thistles ; 
we might plant corn and it might produce thorns ; then, 
indeed, might we calculate that we might occasionally 
"gather grapes from thorns, and figs from thistles." 



CHAPTEK XIX. 

It will, perhaps, be well to look into the evidence of 
this great power which Col. Ingersoll ascribes to nature. 
Voltaire, Paine, and others, in their ignorance, supersti- 
tion, and feebleness of intellect, were unable to account for 
the existence of the universe upon any other ground than 
that there was a God of infinite power, wisdom, and 
goodness, who had created the universe and impressed 
upon all things certain fixed and invariable laws by which 
they were governed, called the laws of nature, and en- 
dowed man with intellect to discover and power to per- 
form all things necessary to his happiness and well-being. 

They attacked Christianity upon the grounds, chiefly, 
that revelation and miracles were impossible, because 
they were violations of these fixed laws ; and that many 
who called themselves Christians were very bad men. 
Nevertheless, Christianity did not perish from their as- 
saults, but continued to prosper and gather strength. 

But Col. Ingersoll, or somebody for him, has discovered 
that the recognition of the existence of a being with 
power to create and give laws to the universe is irretrieva- 
bly fatal to the assertion that "revelation and miracles 
are impossible," because the existence of such a power 
necessarily includes the power to change or suspend those 
laws at will. All argument, therefore, based upon im- 
possibility, of necessity falls to the ground, and affords not 

79 



80* MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

a particle of evidence against revelation or Christianity, 
unless he can prove there is no God. But Col. Ingersoll 
has determined to root Christianity out of the world, and, 
however much he may be wanting in intellect and proof 
for the accomplishment of his purpose, his courage, and, 
if he will not be offended, I will say his " faith," are 
equal to the emergency ; and, perhaps, from the fear* that 
somebody will get ahead of him and " give his glory to 
another," he boldly jumps to the conclusion, which Dar- 
win and others have for years vainly labored to establish, 
" that there is no God." He says in his reply to Judge 
Black : " The universe, according to my idea, is, always 
was, and forever will be. It did not ( come into being,' 
it is the one eternal being — the only thing that ever did, 
does, or can exist." The term universe, of course, em- 
braces everything that exists. So far as we know, of all 
the worlds in existence, ours is the only one in which 
vegetable and animal life and intellect exist ; and we 
know that none of these were always here. But Col. 
IngersolPs devices are not yet exhausted. He lugs in to 
his aid what he calls nature, and while denying her the 
power to create, finds it necessary to invest her with it ; 
for having nothing but dead, unintelligent matter with 
which to work, it will pass his powers of invention to ex- 
plain how she can impart to it life and intellect without 
creating them. He says, " Nature, so far as we can dis- 
cern, without passion and without intention, forms, 
transforms and retransforms forever." Then, of course, 
all that she does is mere accident while she is forming 
and transforming ; there is no guessing what she is going 
to form ; it may turn out — well, just anything or nothing. 



MISTAKES OP INGERSOLL. 81 

Let ns examine into this "forming, transforming and 
retransforming." She gathers up atoms of matter and 
goes to transforming. She has no "intention" as to 
what she will form ; it may be a vegetable, or an animal. 
Does she first make an oak full grown, or just a shrub, or 
an acorn ? "We have no idea which it will be until it is 
finished, nor has nature ; and it may turn out to be 
neither, but something else. Her work may even fizzle out 
to nothing. 
4* 



CHAPTER XX. 

iEsop, in one of his fables, tells of a traveler who was 
recounting to a crowd the wonderful things he had seen 
and the great exploits he had performed in his travels : 
among other things, in relating his own exploits, he said 
he had won the prize at Ehodes by a leap of forty 
feet. An old man then said to him : " If you leaped forty 
feet at Rhodes you can do it here ; and if you will do it 
you will convince us that all the rest you have told us 
may be true." 

Now, I have Col. Ingersoll and nature just where those 
people had the traveler from Rhodes. If nature has done 
half, or a thousandth part of the great things he claims 
for her, she can do a few of the small tilings just to satisfy 
our curiosity, and to convince us that Col. Ingersoll tells 
the truth. Let us try her on a few small things. 

Suppose we try her skill and power upon an acorn ; and 
we will not put her to the trouble of running about to 
gather up the atoms wherever she can find them and 
bringing them together. We will supply her with a good, 
sound acorn, that if planted will vegetate and make a tree ; 
we will grind it up into powder and set nature to work 
upon the atoms, to form, or transform them back into a 
good, sound, live acorn as it was. I wonder how long Col. 
Ingersoll thinks it would take her to accomplish it. Cer- 
tainly, with all the atoms collected ready to her hand, it 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 83 

would be a much easier task than if she had to hunt and 
gather them all up. But we will be content with a milder 
test of her powers. We will just put the acorn into boil- 
ing water for ten minutes. Now here are all the atoms 
gathered together and put into proper shape ; all that we 
will require of her is to restore its -vitality. 

Perhaps she would prefer to test her powers upon a 
man. Well, suppose that, as sometimes happens, a man 
should, instead of turning off the gas in his room at night, 
blow it out, and should in the morning be found dead 
from suffocation. Now here is the man with all the 
bones, flesh, muscles, nerves, blood, and hair, all the atoms 
here gathered together and arranged together in proper 
order, the whole machinery ready to go to work ; nothing- 
lacking but a little vitality. Can't nature, with her won- 
derful power of forming, transforming, and retransf orm- 
ing, supply that little deficiency more easily than to build 
up the whole machinery from dead, inert matter, or from 
a little speck of jelly, or even from " a skulless vertebrate 
in the dim Lauren tian seas ?" What has nature trans- 
formed ? Has she ever transformed an oak into a pine, 
or a pine into a poplar ? Has she ever transformed a 
horse into a cow, a hog into a sheep, or even a flea into a 
fly ?~ Has she ever transformed a peach into a pear, an 
apple into a plum, or even a turnip into a potato ? There 
is not a particle of evidence that nature has ever trans- 
formed one vegetable or one animal into another. Culti- 
vation, or the want of it, may improve or deteriorate a 
vegetable so as to make great changes in its appearance 
and quality, but its great controlling characteristics are 
unchanged. Care and abundance of food may greatly 



84 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

improve the size, appearance, and strength- of the horse or 
cow, or any other animal, and the want of these may 
produce opposite effects ; but the animal remains the 
same. It never gets to be another animal. 

Darwin says that he has produced a great variety of 
pigeons, but he does not as yet claim that he has, with all 
his means, science, and effort, succeeded in changing one 
into a hawk or a chicken ; they are all pigeons still. He 
has changed the color of their feathers and to some ex- 
tent their forms, but he and nature both together have 
never been able to make anything but pigeons out of 
them. 

Failing to find on land anything to sustain them, the 
atheists take to the water to hunt for evidence. Some 
of them (and I believe Darwin does) derive all life, vege- 
table and animal, from little specks of jelly which they 
say were originally found in the water, and which they 
call protoplasms. I believe that is the name. These 
specks they say have life, and that from them has sprung 
all life, vegetable and animal. They don't tell us ex- 
actly how they came there, nor how or where they got 
life, nor what evidence they have that they ever got to be 
men, for the existence of man dates, too far back for their 
personal knowledge, and the most ancient records furnish 
no account of it. And besides, they seem to forget that 
the water of the primeval seas, in which they claim that 
these living specks originated, had been existing under a 
degree of heat in which life could not exist ; and, as we 
know of no life anywhere but on our earth, there was no 
place from which it could come ; in fact there was then 
no life. And although we are told that all water now 



MISTAKES OP MGERSOLL. 85 

teems with life, I believe it was Agassiz who exploded by 
experiment the idea of the spontaneous production of 
life in water that has been boiled and excluded from the 
air. 

Col. Ingersoll claims kindred with the lower animals 
only through the "skulless vertebrates of the dim Lau- 
rentian seas, vertebrates wiggling without knowing why 
they wiggled and swimming without knowing where they 
were going/' and, of course, through the monkey and the 
negro. I don't care to trace his pedigree back to the 
speck of jelly, but if we could fairly get at it, it would be 
a curious and perhaps an amusing employment to watch 
the steps and grades by which he "came up." We are 
not informed as to the number of transformations he had 
to undergo between a "skulless vertebrate in the dim 
Laurent ian seas " and a man ; but supposing the first to be 
a fish, it is probable that he may have been a little shark. 
If he had happened to get to be a snake, what a venom- 
ous reptile he must have been ; if in his travels he got to 
be a pole-cat what a stench he might have raised as he 
whisked his perfume about ; if he had got up amongst 
the canine race, he would doubtless have been a fierce 
bloodhound, and a vicious devil ; if he had passed on to a 
hyena, what an infernally fiendish laugh he would have 
shrieked out over the spoils of the grave ; if he got to be 
a bull, how he would have bellowed and cavorted ; and 
when he got to the last known stage of a monkey, what 
a malicious, capering, grinning, chattering little fellow 
he would have made ! I say the last known stage, be- 
cause, though it seems to be settled that there is but one 
stage between the monkey and the man, they seem not 



86 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

yet to have discovered the missing link. It is possible it 
may be the Guyasceutus, said to be a nondescript animal, 
about half monkey and. half man, or something like that 
proportion, which nobody has ever yet been allowed to see. 

Perhaps I can help Col. Ingersoll and his sect to ac- 
count for their inability to find it heretofore, and make 
some suggestions by which they may overcome the whole 
difficulty by bringing some of them to light. 

Let us imagine Col. Ingersoll, for instance, as he was in 
this state of transition from the monkey. I suppose he 
would be about four feet and a half high, provided he 
could stand erect, but as his hind legs have not yet grown 
straight, perhaps he would not be more than four feet. His ' 
tail would be an inch, an inch and a half or two inches 
long, according to the progress he had made ; little pieces 
of it would be dropping off occasionally, which would 
keep it raw in appearance ; his head would be flat on the 
top; as his jaw-bones would be a little shortened, his lips 
would be protruding and very thick, his nose elevated 
about a quarter of an inch and flat and short, having not 
yet developed between the eyes ; there might be some 
rudiments of fingers on his fore and of toes on "his hind 
feet ; his body would be marked by naked spots and 
streaks, while the balance would be covered with hair ; 
of course, he would be very black. Having lost the in- 
stinct of the brute and not yet acquired the reason of the 
man — in fact, having lost all that was available to the 
monkey and acquired nothing available to the man — he 
would be a hideous sample of the one, and but a miser- 
able caricature of the other, and of course utterly help- 
less. His mother would of course conceal him in the 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 87 

most secluded place she could find, and care for and 
j)rotect him, until he should either die or develop into 
the very lowest type of the negro. Hence they haye 
never been found. 

If Col. Ingersoll will fit out an expedition into Africa, 
and make diligent search in places the most secluded and 
difficult of access, he may possibly discover plenty of 
them ; and what a triumph that would be ! And failing 
in that, if he will take along plenty of Doctor Ramrod's 
Tincture of Gridiron, he may succeed in rapidly changing 
all the monkeys into negroes, and in the course of time 
into white people. I respectfully recommend this plan 
to his careful consideration. 



CHAPTEK XXI. 

Seeikg that " Nature forms, transforms, and retrans- 
forms forever," it is somewhat remarkable that neither 
Col. Ingersoll nor any of his co-workers has attempted to 
explain to ns the process by which this evolution goes on, 
nor how it is that it stops at so many different stages. 
By what law of nature it is that these little pieces of jelly, 
something smaller than the point of a needle, evolve, 
one until it gets to be a "skulless vertebrate in the dim 
Laurentian seas," and stops ; another goes on until it be- 
comes a snake and stops ; another a fish, one a dove, and 
another a hawk, or an eagle ; that in the course of time 
one gets to be a lamb and another a lion, one an elephant 
and another a whale. 

Col. Ingersoll begs and implores for a miracle. I will 
show him one. He says, "We are told that nature has 
a superior. Let this superior for one single instant con- 
trol nature, and we will admit the truth of your asser- 
tions." He says, "Nature forms, transforms, and re- 
transforms forever," and that "the laws of nature are 
absolute, eternal, inexorable." Now, whatever she may 
have done in the beginning of time in the way of trans- 
forming, it is certain that she has not, in the knowledge 
of man, transformed one vegetable or one animal into 
another. Have the laws of nature been stopped by a 
superior ? If they have, there's a miracle. Or has she 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 89 

quit the business ? It is one or the ofcher, and in either 
case, according to Col. Ingersoll, there is a superior. 

Let it be borne in mind that Col. Ingersoll's arguments, 
as I suppose he calls them, against the existence of a God 
of Creation are, first, that his moral character is bad, 
which I haye shown has nothing to do with the question. 
Second, that everything is done sometimes by nature, 
sometimes by the eternal, inexorable laws of nature, and 
sometimes without any law. What does he know about 
the laws of nature ? Let us catechise him a little. 

Suppose you could give a train of a hundred loaded cars 
a speed of a hundred miles a minute on a railroad, and 
were to approach a curve without abating the speed, what 
would be the result ? Why that, according to all that 
we know of the laws of motion, it would keep straight on 
and jump the track ; the speed of the engine would be 
greatly abated the moment it struck the ground, and the 
cars would be hurled against it and against each other 
with a force that in the twinkling of an eye would reduce 
everything to a solid mass of ruin. But here is this im- 
mense amount of matter composing our earth, with no 
track to guide, no flanges to hold it in place, careering 
through space in a curved line around the sun with the 
speed of a thousand miles a minute, turning the curves 
with the ease and grace with which a ship obedient to 
her helm makes a curve in smooth water, never swerv- 
ing a hair's-breadth from her course, and never- failing 
to keep her appointed time to the second. 

' But Col. Ingersoll is never at a loss for a demonstra- 
tion to suit his purpose of his own or somebody else's. 
He says, "It has been demonstrated that the earth 



90 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

would fall into the sun only for the fact, that it is at- 
tracted by other worlds." Well, that's something like 
the kitchen-maid's troubles about the prospective burning 
of her prospective son. Who demonstrated it, and how ? 
What reason was there for demonstrating it ? I suppose 
the idea struck some fellow, that some of these days the 
attraction of the sun for the earth might get so strong 
that it would drag us in and burn us up, and therefore 
it behooved him to invent some reason why it had not 
been done heretofore, and could not be done hereafter. It 
did not occur to him that God had arranged all this long 
ago, and so he concludes that nature has put some other 
worlds away off yonder, to enter into a contest with the 
sun for us, and what a patch-work he or nature has made 
of it! 

According to this idea nature made a bad job of it at 
the start, and when she found out her mistake, not hav- 
ing sense enough to fix no our solar system, so that it 
could manage its own business, she had to run away off 
into space, to hunt up some other world to prevent the 
sun burning us up. 

How did the earth get into its place ? This would be 
a very useless question if addressed to a man who believes 
in a God, because we know that he would answer at once 
that God put it there, but how, we do not know. But 
those who ascribe everything to nature and her laws must 
show that everything is within her power, and consistent 
with her laws. There must be no contradictory and con- 
flicting laws. I repeat, therefore, " How did the earth 
get into her place ? " Did madam, or miss, nature take 
it in her hand and put it exactly in the right place, and 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 91 

give it exactly the right send-off in its course ? Attrac- 
tion is one of the great reliances of these sons of nature, 
to do everything and explain everything. Has it ever oc- 
curred to them what a delicate thing this is, so far as we 
know anything about it. Take a smoothly polished piece 
of iron and put it on a smooth plate of glass, then slowly 
approach a magnet to it ; there is a point at which the 
magnet will not move the iron, and from which, if you 
move it the thousandth part of an inch nearer, the iron 
will begin to move to it; and the nearer it comes, the greater 
will be the velocity and force with which it moves to the 
iron. 

Now, suppose that when the earth was floating about 
in space and first came within the influence of the attrac- 
tion of the sun, it was but one mile farther off than it is 
now. A body falling to the earth moves sixteen feet the 
first second, thirty-two feet the next, forty-eight feet the 
third, and so on, with accelerated velocity, and therefore 
with increasing momentum every second. In falling that 
one mile towards the sun, it would have acquired an al- 
most inconceivable velocity and momentum, as science 
tells us that the power of attraction increases as the 
square of the distance diminishes. Now, will Col. Inger- 
soll, or some of his demonstrators, tell us by what law of 
nature the earth would have stopped just at the end of 
that mile ? On the contrary, we know that for it to have 
stopped there would have been a direct violation of all 
the laws of motion of which we have any knowledge. 

Col. Ingersoll says, " It has been calculated by one of 
the best mathematicians and astronomers of the age," 
that to stop the earth when turning round at the rate of 



92 MISTAKES OF rNGERSOLL. 

a thousand miles an hour would cause as much heat as it 
would take to burn a lump of solid coal three times as 
big as the globe." 

Then, what must have been the amount of heat gener- 
ated by stopping the earth at exactly the right place, 
from a velocity of a thousand miles a minute ? I don't 
understand how the calculation was made, as I am neither 
a mathematician nor an astronomer ; the result arrived 
at may, or may not be correct ; it is given by Col. 
Ingersoll as evidence that the earth could not have been 
stopped in its diurnal revolution for the accommodation 
of Joshua, to give him time to finish up the slaughter of 
the Amorites before dark. If it is good for that, it is 
good to prove that the earth in its journey to the sun 
could not have stojyped just at the right place and time 
without producing a heat that would have sent it off into 
gas. But let us look a little farther at Col. Ingersoll's 
hyfaluting nonsense about the attraction of the earth 
by other worlds in order to keep us out of the clutches of 
the sun. When I was a school-boy, science said that the 
earth was ninety-five millions of miles from the sun ; now 
it has got the distance to a little over ninety-three mil- 
lions. If Col. Ingersoll's theory be true, it may be that 
these outside worlds that have been appointed to take care 
of us have got tired of watching us and neglected their 
duty, so that we may have actually started to fall into 
the sun and got two millions of miles on our way, but we 
will wait and see. 

For the present we will assume that science, which 
is always infallible, is right as to the ninety-three 
millions of miles. In that case science proves that the 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 93 

earth is a hundred and eighty-six millions of miles nearer 
to these great outside worlds when it is on one side of 
the sun than when it is on the other side. I believe that 
science says that the force of attraction between two 
bodies is inversely as the square of the distance between 
them. That is to say, if you put two bodies which at- 
tract each other one inch apart the force of attraction 
would be sixteen times greater than when you put them 
four inches apart. 'Now, when the earth is on the side 
of the sun next to the attracting world, it must be 
attracted just exactly enough to prevent her from going 
to the sun, no more, no less, for if it is a hundredth part 
of an ounce too much, it would bring the earth nearer to 
it, by which its power of attraction would be increased, 
while that of the sun would be proportionally diminished ; 
consequently the earth would begin to move towards the 
attracting world ; slowly at first, but with a constantly 
accelerated velocity and force, and we should soon find 
ourselves in a hot chase after the attracting world. Per- 
haps some great mathematician or astronomer may be 
able to calculate how long it would take us to catch it. 

Admit that the contending forces should be exactly 
right while the earth is between the sun and the attracting 
world, how would it be when the earth got on the other 
side, a hundred and eighty-six millions of miles away from 
the attracting world, with the sun exactly between them ? 
Why, clearly, that its attractive force, though greatly 
diminished, instead of being opposed to that of the sun, 
would be added to it, and the necessary result would be 
that the earth would rush right into the sun. 

Or do Col. Ingersoll and his demonstrators hold that 



94 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

nature has set apart and appointed one of these immense 
worlds, said by science to be almost infinitely greater than 
our earth, as a sort of nurse, with nothing to do but to 
keep chasing around the sun after us to prevent us from 
falling into the fire ? 

Or perhaps they think that nature has stationed around 
a dozen or more of these great world nurses to look after 
and take care of us, so that when the attracting force of 
one becomes too weak from distance, another shall be 
ready to take us in charge. 

]STow, the truth is, they know nothing about it. They 
cannot tell how all these great worlds are hung and sus- 
tained in space ; nor can they explain or comprehend how 
it is that they do not get into a general and universal 
confusion, by running up against each other. They have 
discovered by observation that the earth and the other 
planets revolve around the sun, and invariably in the 
same courses and the same times ; they can, therefore, 
calculate exactly where they will be at any given time, 
and their relative positions to each other. By the aid of 
trigonometry they can measure their dimensions and dis- 
tances, but there is nothing within the reach of the human 
intellect that can explain how they got their start, nor how 
they were put in motion, nor how they were kept in their 
places. The only rational solution of these things is that 
they are the work of an omnipotent intelligence. 

It is attributed to the attraction of gravitation. There 
is not a particle of evidence to support the assertion. It 
is claimed that Sir Isaac Newton discovered this from 
speculating upon the reason of the fall of an apple. He 
did no such thing. Everybody in the world, and that ever 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 95 

had been in it, knew that any body will fall to the ground 
unless it is held up by something. That is all that New- 
ton knew about it. He knew the fact, just as everybody 
else did, but the cause of it he knew no more than a horse 
or Col. Ingersoll. The only explanation of it is that God 
made it so. 

Newton gave it a name, and assumed, and perhaps 
properly, that it is a property of all matter ; and formerly 
it was held that the earth was drawn to the sun by the 
attraction of gravitation, and was prevented from falling 
into it by centrifugal force, and from flying off by centrip- 
etal force ; but matter at rest has neither centrifugal nor 
centrij^etal force ; and nobody has ever yet been able to 
tell how the earth got started in its course around the 
sun exactly in the right time and exactly in the right 
place, nor how it has been and is kept there. 

Supposing it to have been wandering about somewhere 
in the regions of space, and coming within the sphere of 
the attraction of the sun, it would, according to all that 
we know of the properties of matter and attraction, and 
of the laws governing them, have gone directly to it with- 
out attempting to fly off at a tangent. 

If all these great worlds were to run together into one 
big pile, it might be readily accounted for upon the as- 
sumption that they had been drawn together by the at- 
traction of gravitation ; but gravitation cannot account 
for the fact that every one of the countless worlds keeps 
its own regular courses and times. 

God arranged it all, and keeps them all in order by his 
own laws, incomprehensible by, and inexplicable to, our 
intellects. 



96 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

According to Col. Ingersoll's ideas, there is and has 
always been going on a contest between some of these 
great, far-off worlds and the sun, as to which shall have 
us. Who knows but that, one of these days, if there 
should happen to be the least bit of a jostling, we may 
find ourselves traveling off at the rate of a million of 
miles a minute, after one of these great big worlds, untold 
millions of miles off in space. 

And what will Col. Ingersoll and his scientists do about 
these comets with their tails forty millions of miles long ? 
It is just as much as the sun and these outside great 
worlds can do to keep the earth where she belongs. Ac- 
cording to Col. Ingersoll's laws of nature, half an ounce 
either way would send her off kiting nobody can tell 
where. Scientists say that there have been all the sum- 
mer half a dozen of these tramps of comets prowling 
around about us, much nearer than any of these great 
worlds that are keeping watch over us to keep us out of 
the ravenous maw of the sun, and now they say there 
is another one just come. Perhaps these tramps are 
prowling around watching for a chance to run off with 
us. That they should come out in such crowds, looks as 
if they mean mischief. While the sun and the great 
outside worlds are contending for us, each exerting all 
its power, and each barely able to hold its own, may not 
one of these eccentric fellows just slip in and take us to 
itself ? 

" The lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown, 

Up jumps the little dog, and knocks them both down." 

But, even if they are without any evil intent or hostile 



MISTAKES OP INGEESOLL. 97 

purpose, they seem to be so reckless in their movements, 
that the inhabitants of the earth have always more or 
less dreaded that they might in their carelessness be 
destructive to us, and if Col. IngersolTs ideas are correct 
about nature's bungling or ignorant work in making our 
safety dependent upon some far-off world, about which 
we know nothing, it may be possible that one of these 
comets may in some of its tantrums get in here amongst 
us, and so derange the equilibrium of attraction, that we 
may soon find ourselves burnt up by the sun or taking a 
winter's trip to one of those great worlds. 

By observation, men can and do discover the existence 
of a great many things and their relations to, and their 
influences upon, each other, and this is Science ; but, 
when scientists go to hunting about for ultimate causes 
outside of the omnipotence and omniscience of God, they 
grope and blunder in darkness and ignorance. They can 
see the motions of the planets, and it is as easy to say 
that they are governed by attraction as anything else. It 
would be just as easy to say they were governed by fate, 
by electricity, or magnetism ; for, as nobody knows any 
more about it than they do, nobody can successfully con- 
tradict them ; everybody can see that they move regu- 
larly, and that is all that anybody knows, or in our 
present state of existence can know about it. 
5 



CHAPTEK XXII. 

I]sr order to establish any cause for anything that we 
know to exist, we must prove, first, that such alleged 
cause is adequate to the production of the whole effect ; 
second, we must have positive evidence of the existence 
and action of the cause, and the absence of all other 
causes ; or, third, we must establish both the existence 
and action of the cause by proving that nothing else 
could have produced the effect. 

Sometimes scientific men in their anxiety to discover 
the causes of existing phenomena, assume as causes 
things the claim of which cannot be sustained by this 
test. Amongst these, in my opinion, is the story that 
the tides are caused by the attraction of the moon. 

Col. Ingersoll no doubt accepts that theory in full li by 
that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called 
faith." 

Let us examine the grounds upon which this theory 
stands. In the first place, there is no evidence that the 
attraction of the moon is adequate to the production of 
the phenomena of the tides ; and, therefore, there can 
be no evidence that it does produce them, unless it can 
be proved that they could not possibly be produced by 
any other cause. The truth is, the whole strength of 
the argument is opposed to the assumption that this at- 
traction is adequate to the production of the results at- 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 99 

tributed to it. The only facts in favor of it are, first, 
that all bodies attract each other ; second, that the 
moon is nearer to the earth than any other body ; and, 
third, that the tides rise and fall at certain stages of the 
moon. This last is the most plausible of the reasons in 
support of the claim, but, without other evidence, is of 
no value, because coincidence is alone neither causation 
nor the evidence of it. And as (in common parlance) 
the moon goes around the earth every day, and the tides 
rise every day, there is, so far as I can see, no reason why 
the tides might not rise and fall as well at one stage of 
the moon as another. 

The theory is that the moon by its power of attraction 
drags the water after it, until it piles it up very high in 
some places and very little in others. Formerly it was, I 
believe, stated that the tides rose to the height of sixty 
feet in the Bay of Fundy. 

Let us see whether in accordance with well-established 
laws the attraction of the moon is adequate to the pro- 
duction of these effects. 

I believe it is settled beyond all question that between 
two bodies which attract each other the attraction is in- 
versely as the square of the distance. If this be true, 
there is an end to the argument ; for, when we take into 
consideration the relative sizes of the earth and the moon, 
and the relative distances at which they act upon the 
water, there is no escape from the conclusion that the 
force exerted upon the water by the moon is so infinitesi- 
mal, compared with that exerted by the earth, that it 
could not appreciably affect, much less, that it could 
exert the almost inconceivable amount of force necessary 



100 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

to lift millions of tons twenty feet above its ordinary level, 
and that, too, in opposition to the attraction of the earth. 
One of two things is settled beyond controversy, either 
that it is not true that the power of attraction between 
two bodies is inversely as the square of the distance, or 
that the tides are not due to the attraction of the moon. 
But there is another difficulty in the way. "When the 
moon has lifted water twenty feet, the diminution of dis- 
tance has increased its power and diminished that of the 
earth ; it ought, therefore, to continue to carry it on till it 
gets it to herself, but instead of that, she lets it go, and 
drops it. Why is that ? By the way, let us inquire 
something about this thing called attraction. "What is 
it ? Is it matter which the moon sends out to pick up' 
our water and carry it off ? If so, what becomes of it 
when it lets the water loose ? Does it return to the moon, 
or does it mingle with our water and remain with us ? If 
so, we shall at last get the whole of the moon. If it is 
not matter, what is it ? 

There is another difficulty. If the moon has the power 
to pick up and carry about such an immense weight of 
water, she has power to lift up lighter things upon the 
surface of the earth, and she would be constantly carrying 
them off. She would carry off our atmosphere and our 
clouds, but we never hear of her doing any such things. 

But there is still another difficulty. The theory does 
not account for the phenomena of the tides. The mo- 
tions of the moon are regular and so are those of the 
earth ; and those of the tides ought to be, and would be, 
if the theory be correct ; but they are not. They vary 
greatly in height, not only at different places, but at the 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 101 

same place. There are four tides a day at some places, 
and but two at others, and only one at others, and at 
others scarcely any. They vary also in their times, so 
that they cannot be predicted exactly. 

There are thousands of yery intelligent people all oyer 
the country who belieye that the particular phase of the 
moon in which hogs are killed or seeds planted exerts an 
important influence upon results. Perhaps it has not 
occurred to them that this is due to the moon's attrac- 
tion, nor, so far as I am informed, have they, by the aid 
of Algebra, spherical trigonometry and fluxions, ever 
demonstrated the truth of their theory, but they claim 
to have established its truth by experiment. This theory 
science derides as the offspring of ignorance and supersti- 
tion, as if it were not just as easy for the moon by her 
power of attraction to extract the juices out of a piece of 
meat, or the germinating or productive power out of a 
little seed, as to lift up and throw about at her will 
millions of tons of water. 

Doubtless science could demonstrate that the Gulf 
Stream and other ocean currents are produced by the 
moon, but for the unreasonable obstinacy with which 
they pursue their courses without regard to her attrac- 
tions. 

In view of all these things it is strange that scientific 
men have not looked to something more potent and sub- 
stantial than the imaginary attraction of the moon as a 
cause for the production of such wonderful results. It is 
still more strange, when an all-sufficient cause was plain 
and at their feet. 

Nearly forty years ago I saw a rude machine, conceived 



102 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

and constructed by an obscure farmer, by which he dem- 
onstrated beyond all doubt, that the tides are produced 
by the diurnal rotation of the earth on its axis. His ma- 
chine produced the high tides at the places where they 
are high, and the low ones where they are low, the Gulf- 
stream, and even the maelstrom on the coast of Nor- 
way. 

He was then on his way to Washington to patent his 
machine, and I heard no more of it. It was at the time 
when the whole country was struggliDg to gather up some 
of the fragments of the fortunes that had been wrecked 
by the crash of eighteen hundred and thirty-seyen, and 
had neither the time nor the spirit to devote their atten- 
tion to such subjects. 

Occasionally I have thought of it as a matter of great 
interest and importance to science, and within the present 
year I instituted inquiries in reference to it and learned 
that he had secured a patent, and had also written a book 
upon the subject, but had died before he had been able 
to do anything with the machine or publish his book. 
Upon application at the patent office I found his specifi- 
cations filed with his application and copies of his draw- 
ings, but was informed that the model had been burnt 
by the fire which occurred in the office a few years ago. 

I have introduced the matter here with the hope that 
it may come under the notice of some scientific man, who 
will take interest enough in it to induce him to investi- 
gate it. 



I 



CHAPTEK XXm. 

Col. Ikgeesoll commences his onslaught upon the gods, 
by saying " Each nation has created a god, and the god 
always resembled his creators. " As to one of these state- 
ments, there is no evidence to sustain it ; as to the other, 
the facts are against it. So far as we know, or can know, 
anything about it, the belief in the existence of a God is 
co-equal with the existence of man. We haye nothing 
from history or tradition that they ever existed apart ; it 
is not, therefore, unreasonable to assume that this belief 
was created with him, or that the knowledge was im- 
parted by his Creator, provided he was created. 

As to the statement " the god has always resembled 
the creator," there can be nothing farther from the truth, 
for all nations have invested their gods with omnipotence 
and omniscience, with whatever other attributes they 
may have ascribed to them. 

He says "none of these gods could give any true ac- 
count of the creation of this little earth." How does he 
know ? Can he render any sensible reason why such an 
account should be given ? I do not know, and therefore 
shall not attempt to explain, why we were constituted as 
we are, whether we were created by a power superior to 
nature, or brought up by nature from the " skulless ver- 
tebrates in the dim Laurentian seas," but it is beyond all 
cavil true that, constituted as we are, the first words in 

103 



104 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

the Bible, saying " In the beginning God created the 
Heaven and the earth," give us all the information on 
the subject that it is in the power of omnipotence to im- 
part to us with our limited capacity. If there is fault in 
the matter, Col. Ingersoll must charge it to his goddess, 
nature, who " forms, transforms, and re transforms for- 
ever," because that in "forming, transforming, and re- 
transforming " us from "the skulless vertebrates of the 
dim Laurentian seas," she stopped without giving us in- 
tellect to comprehend and understand everything, and 
without even giving him the power to " conceive of any- 
thing utterly unlike what he has seen or felt." 

I very much doubt whether nature has been able to 
explain to him to his entire satisfaction the various pro- 
cesses and steps by which she transformed and re trans- 
formed him from "the skulless vertebrate" to his present 
condition. He probably don't remember to have " seen" 
them, as he passed him along "through all that crawls, 
and swims, and floats, and climbs, and walks, and 
finally produced the gentleman," as he is, and there- 
fore can conceive of them only because he has "felt" 
them. 

It is said that frequently, when people are visiting for 
the first time, as they suppose, some scene, they are at 
once impressed with an inexplicable, but irresistible con- 
viction that they are not there for the first time, and 
that in the far, shadowy past, in another state of exist- 
ence, ever} r thing around them has been familiar to 
them. If these impressions ever reach to a revelation 
of the state of existence which calls up these reminis- 
cences, Col. Ingersoll may sometimes have found strange 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 105 

experiences of the nature of the several animals he has 
had the honor to represent. 

Col. Ingersoll adds another to the already numerous 
examples of the absurdities and inconsistencies into which 
even great intellects are involved when they are prosti- 
tuted to the purpose of establishing and maintaining a 
position, rather than engaged in an honest search for the 
truth. 

In his lecture on ghosts, he says : "In New England 
a woman was charged with being a witch and with 
having changed herself into a fox. While in that con- 
dition she was attacked and bitten by some dogs. A 
committee of three men, by order of the court, examined 
this woman. They removed her clothing and searched 
for ' witch spots/ That is to say, spots into which 
needles could be thrust without giving her pain. They 
reported to the court that such spots were found. She 
denied, however, that she had ever changed herself into 
a fox. Upon the report of the committee she was found 
guilty, and actually executed. This was done by our 
Puritan fathers, by the gentlemen who braved the dan- 
gers of the deep for the sake of worshiping God and 
persecuting their fellow men. 

" In those days people believed in what was known as 
lycanthropy — that is, that persons with the assistance of 
the devil could assume the form of wolves. An instance 
is given where a man was attacked by a wolf. He de- 
fended himself and succeeded in cutting off one of the 
animal's paws. The wolf ran away. The man picked up 
the paw, put it in his pocket, and carried it home. There 
he found his wife with one of her hands gone. He took 
5* 



106 MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 

the paw from his pocket. It had changed to a human 
hand. He charged his wife with being a witch. She 
was tried. She confessed her guilt and was burned." 

The intelligent reader will perhaps be surprised on be- 
ing told that in the face of his conviction that we have 
come up from " the skulless vertebrates of the dim Lau- 
ren dan seas/' Col. Ingersoll cited these instances as evi- 
dences of the gross ignorance and superstition into which 
people of those days were sunk. He evidently forgot 
himself, or was deliberately attempting to impose upon 
what he supposed was the ignorance of his hearers. These 
people believed, like him, in the transforming and re- 
transforming power of nature ; only they called the trans- 
forming power by another name — the devil ; mark it, 
Col. Ingersoll does not say that he does not believe that 
one woman was not turned into a fox and the other into 
a wolf ; and he will hardly have the effrontery to say it. 
If a cunning woman who but a few stages back had been 
a fox, wanted to rob a hen-roost, couldn't nature re- 
transform her into a fox long enough to do it ; or if a 
vicious, malignant one, who a few generations back had 
been a she wolf, proposed to give her husband a thrash- 
ing, couldn't nature retransform her into a she wolf for 
the occasion, as easily as she could transform a piece of 
jelly into a new elephant, or make Col. Ingersoll out of 
a monkey ? 

Naturalists say that all animals, man not excepted, 
sometimes, (I suppose by a law of nature,) breed back to 
some former ancestor. Suppose that in coming up from 
the skulless vertebrate, one of these women had passed 
through the fox stage and the other through the wolf 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 107 

stage, would Col. Ingersoll contend that it would haye 
required any great stretch of nature's retransforming 
power to put them back occasionally for a little time, or 
even permanently into their former condition of a few 
generations back F 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

It cannot be denied that Col. Ingersoll is a hard subject 
to handle, not because he advances any even plausible 
argument against the existence of a God of Creation, but 
because he jumps so rapidly from one absurdity into an- 
other, that it is laborious to follow and expose them. He 
gets things mixed up into such inextricable confusion in 
his own mind, that he forgets at one time what he has 
said at another, and constantly contradicts himself. For 
examine, by a course of bold assertion, without a i^article 
of proof, he convinces himself that "there could have 
been no first cause." He forgets that he has said : " Xa- 
ture is but an endless series of efficient causes." If she 
was endless, she must have existed from eternity, and of 
necessity must have been "a first cause. 5 '" 

He devotes a whole lecture to prove that the universe 
is governed by law. He closes his lecture upon Hum- 
boldt with the following pompous announcement : "The 
world is his monument ; upon the eternal granite of her 
hills he inscribed his name, and there, upon everlasting 
stone, his genius wrote this the sublimest of truths : 
"The Universe is Governed by Law." 

The capitals are his. 

Well, admit all this, does it afford a shadow of evidence 
that God did not create the universe and ordain the laws 
by which it is governed 
108 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 109 

Yet, after wasting a great many words to prove what, so 
far as I know, nobody of ordinary intelligence ever de- 
nied, what God has written in living light upon the face 
of all His works, and what Moses, or whoever wrote the 
Pentateuch, proclaimed to the world thousands of years 
ago, that the universe is governed by law, Col. Ingersoll 
turns around, and, if I understand the meaning of his 
words, denies that anj^thing is governed by law. But he 
says so many things from which no meaning can be ex- 
tracted, and so many things the meaning of which, when 
discovered, is so inconsistent with reason and common 
sense as to render it almost uncharitable to suppose that 
they could have been uttered by a sane man, that to se- 
cure myself against the suspicion of misrepresenting him 
in saying that " he denies that anything is governed by 
law," I will give his own words, that the reader may judge 
for himself. It will be seen that it is not an unconsid- 
ered assertion. He says: "To make myself clear, 
water runs down hill. The theist says that this happens 
because there is behind the phenomenon an active law. 
As a matter of fact, the law is this side of the phenome- 
non. Law does not cause the phenomenon, but the phe- 
nomenon causes the idea of law in our minds, and the 
idea is produced from the fact that under like circum- 
stances the same phenomenon always happens." 

Now, when a man of common sense is convinced of 
" the fact that under like circumstances the same phe- 
nomenon always happens," the only idea that is, or can 
be produced on his mind is, that it is the result of fixed 
invariable irresistible law, and that he can always calcu- 
late with absolute certainty upon the same result un- 



110 MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 

der like circumstances. But Col. Ingersoll has no just 
ground upon which to base such a calculation, for his fun- 
damental doctrines as opposed to a God of Creation 
are, that " there is no power superior to nature," and 
that " nature without passion, and without intention, 
forms, transforms, and retransforms forever," and though 
he may have seen this result " happen " hundreds of 
times, he can have no assurance that it will "happen" 
again, for as there is no law against it, and no power 
able to prevent it, his goddess nature may, the very next 
time, come along, and by her transforming power, pro- 
duce an entirely different phenomenon. For example. 
All his life he has seen what are called peach-trees pro- 
duce peaches. 

When those who believe that God has made it a fixed 
and invariable law of the peach-tree that it shall, under 
favorable circumstances, produce peaches, see the tree in 
full bloom in the spring-time, they calculate with cer- 
tainty that if the favorable circumstances should con- 
tinue, they will in due time gather peaches. But Col. 
Ingersoll can make no certain calculation of that sort, 
because just as his peaches are about to begin to ripen, 
since there is no law against it, and no power able to pre- 
vent it, his goddess nature may come along, and " without 
intention transform " his peaches into Irish potatoes, or 
even into live bull-frogs. Indeed, though he has seen 
thousands of people grow up, and live, and die in human 
form, he has no assurance that he will retain that form 
to-morrow, for as his goddess nature has, " without in- 
tention, formed, and transformed, and retransformed " 
him from " the skulless vertebrates of the dim Lauren- 



MISTAKES OF INGEBSOLL. Ill 

fcian seas/' through all the animal world, through all that 
crawls and swims, and floats, and climbs, and walks " up 
to his present form, she may, as there is no law against 
it, and no superior power to prevent it," without inten- 
tion, "transform" him back through some of these vari- 
ous grades and stages into a form altogether different 
from his present one. As there is no limit to, nor inten- 
tion in, her forming transforming power, she might give 
him the body of a hog, the neck of a bull, the head of a 
hyena, the horn of a rhinoceros, and the tail of a mon- 
key, and the legs of a kangaroo. She might cover one 
part of his body with quills of the porcupine, another 
with the wool of the sheep, and another with the feath- 
ers of the goose, and last of all, clap on his head the ears 
of the ass. It requires no stretch of the imagination to 
conceive that the power that can work upa " Skulless 
vertebrate in the dim Laurentian Seas " into a Shake- 
speare, could, without trouble, produce such an animal 
out of an Ingersoll even "without intention." 

Col. Ingersoll says: " Mr. Black probably thinks that 
the difference in the weight of rocks and clouds was 
created by law; that parallel lines fail to unite, because 
it is illegal; that diameter and circumference could have 
been so made that it would be a greater distance across 
than around a circle; that a straight line could inclose a 
triangle, if not prevented by law; and that a little legis- 
lation could make it possible for two bodies to occupy 
the same space at the same time." 

Certainly, Mr. Black believes that the difference be- 
tween the weight of rocks and clouds was created by law, 
as does everybody else, who has as much sense as anybody 



112 MISTAKES OP INGEKSOLL. 

not more than half idiot ought to have been born 
with. 

What we call weight, or, in other words, specific gravity, 
simply indicates the relative quantity of matter in its dif- 
ferent forms occupying the same amount of space. For 
aught that we know all matter is of precisely the same 
absolute weight. We know that in a perfect vacuum a 
feather falls with the same velocity as a lump of gold, 
and that if by possibility a pound of feathers could be 
compressed into a space as small as that occupied by a 
pound of gold, they would be of the same weight or spe- 
cific gravity. This probably can be done by nothing short 
of omnipotence, as it would be too dangerous a power to 
entrust to man. 

So far as we know, or shall probably ever be able to find 
out, the difference in the apparent weight of matter in its 
different forms is due entirely to the resistance of the at- 
mosphere as opposed to what is called the attraction of 
gravitation. 

The attraction of gravitation acts upon quantity of ab- 
solute matter only, without reference to volume, while 
the resistance of the atmosphere is in proportion to the 
volume, without reference to the quantity of matter. A 
cubic inch of gold weighs nine times as much as a cubic 
inch of gypsum. Being of equal volume the resistance of 
the atmosphere to each is equal, but the attraction of 
gravitation is nine times greater upon the gold. In a 
pound of gypsum there is as much absolute mat- 
ter as in a pound of gold, and the attraction of 
gravitation is equal upon both, but there is nine times 
the volume in the gypsum, and the resistance of the at- 



MISTAKES OP INGEKSOLL. 113 

mosphere to the pound of gypsum is nine times that to 
the gold. 

Be these things as they may, God in his power, wisdom, 
and goodness, has made it the law of the being of all 
matter in all its forms, that eyery form shall, volume for 
volume, differ in weight from every other form ; and he 
has reflected to little purpose upon His works, who does 
not see and adore the wisdom which conceived, the benev- 
olence which prompted, and the power which executed- the 
law. Of this I shall say more when I come to speak of 
the moral character of God. 

As to Col. Ingersoll's silly attempt to fix upon his 
opponent the responsibility for his own absurdities and 
self-contradictions, it is only necessary to say there is an 
extreme of absurdity at which the senses of men revolt, 
not only without aid from the intellect, but in defiance 
of all that any power of intellect can do to force it upon 
the understanding. This extreme Col. Ingersoll has 
reached in his senseless twaddle about parallel lines meet- 
ing, the diameter and circumference of a circle, a straight 
line inclosing a triangle, and two bodies occupying the 
same space at the same sime. His assumptions of what 
he professes to suppose that Mr. Black probably thinks 
may be possibilities, destroy the identity of the things he 
enumerates ; in other words, divest them of the qualities 
which constitute their existence. Lines are parallel be- 
cause they cannot unite. A line between two points 
ceases to be a curved line if its length is not greater than 
a straight line connecting the same parts ; a triangle is a 
triangle because it is inclosed by three lines ; two bodies 
are two because they cannot occupy the same space at 
the same time. 



114 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

Colonel Ingersoll, or his goddess, nature, may make 
two lines meet, and lie may swear they are parallel, make 
a curved line between two points and swear it is 
shorter than a straight line between the same points, 
draw a straight line and swear that it incloses a triangle, 
place two bodies side by side and swear that they occuj)y the 
same space at the same time, and a man of the common- 
est understanding would, upon bare supposition, unhesi- 
tatingly set him down as a hopeless idiot, without even 
giving him the benefit of the usual alternative of "knave 
or fool ; " for he could not conceive it possible that a man 
with the least spark of sound intellect could so stultify 
himself as to seriously assert as truths absurdities too 
palpable and monstrous to deceive the grossest ignorance, 
or to impose upon the most trusting credulity, and too 
oppressively stupid to win for him even the poor merit 
of lying "just for the fun of the thing." Yet Col. In- 
gersoll's lectures teem with just such absurdities. 

As the hallucination of a confirmed lunatic such ab- 
surdity might provoke to smiles of mirth, or move to 
tears of pity, according to the temper of the hearers ; as 
the harmless extravagances of an admitted "crank*' 
they could excite nothing but ridicule. 

But here is a man, according to the verdict of friend 
and foe, eminently endowed with some of the elements 
which constitute pure intellect, possessed of many of the 
accompaniments and graces which ornament and add 
immensely to the availability and power of really great 
intellects, and make mediocrity interesting, and even 
dullness tolerable ; a man whose tender sympathies are so 
thorough as to make his heart bleed when he contem- 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 115 

plates the sufferings of the millions now dead, of those 
who lived when the world appeared to be insane, and to 
cause him to feel that " It is enough to make one almost 
insane with pity to think what man in the long night 
has suffered ; " a man whose devotion to truth and justice 
is so strong, and whose heart is so mightily stirred with 
indignation against the arrogance and presumption, the 
tyranny, cruelty, injustice, oppression, and intolerance, 
and the fraud, falsehood, hypocrisy, cupidity, and craft 
of one class of the people of the present time, and so 
moved by compassion and sympathy for the sufferings of 
the other class, from the gross darkness, ignorance, and 
superstition in which they are sunk, and the abject men- 
tal and moral slavery and degradation in which they are 
held in this enlightened age and free country, that he 
has buckled on his armor, and in the true spirit of knight 
errantry, despising all dangers and defying all opposi- 
tion, has gone forth, with the determined purpose to bat- 
ter down the strongholds of the oppressors, to strike the 
fetters from the limbs of the mental and moral slaves, to 
dispel the clouds of darkness, ignorance, and superstition, 
and bathe the minds of men in the effulgent light of 
pure and unadulterated truth, professing that "he wants 
to do all the good he can, and to render all the service 
possible in the holy cause of truth," and asserting that 
" he is doing what little he can to hasten the day when 
society shall cease producing millionaires and mendicants 
— engorged indolence and famished industry — truth in 
rags and superstition robed and crowned." 

These are grand objects and purposes, in the accomplish- 
ment of which every good man must wish -him God-speed. 



116 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

But when he is found prostituting his really great 
powers to the support of some of the greatest evils that 
have ever afflicted humanity, and, in the discussion of a 
subject of paramount importance to every human being, 
he is found seriously attempting to force upon the minds 
of sensible men the most glaring absurdities as sound 
arguments in aid of the development of truth, the only 
feelings that could be produced upon the minds of right- 
thinking men would be those of indignation and con- 
tempt, but for the sad conviction that must be forced 
upon them that he is simply a splendid ruin. 



CHAPTEE XXY. 

Defeated at every point, as a last desperate resort to 
escape from a God of omnipotence, lie flies into the arms 
of a blind, unintelligent, aimless fatalism, which, depriv- 
ing man of all freedom of thought, speech, feeling, and 
action, makes him the helpless tool of a despotism which 
he cannot resist, and of necessity diyests all action 
of all moral character. Judged by any received or any 
conceivable standard of morals, nothing that we can do, 
say, or think is either right or wrong, or justly entitled 
to praise or liable to censure, much less worthy of re- 
ward or punishment. In fact, there can be no standard 
of right and wrong. 

He says — whether truly or not I do not know: "The 
theologians admit that the phenomena of matter tend at 
least to disproye the existence of any power superior to 
nature, because in such phenomena we see nothing but 
an endless chain of efficient causes — nothing but the 
force of a mechanical necessity. They, therefore, aj)peal 
to what they denominate the phenomena of mind to es- 
tablish this superior power. 

" The trouble is, that in the phenomena of mind we 
find the same endless chain of efficient causes, the same 
mechanical necessity. Every motive, every desire, every 
fear, hope, and dream must have been necessarily pro- 
duced. • There is no room in the mind of man for provi- 

117 



118 MI3TAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

dence or chance." "They found that disease, death, 
life, thought, heat, cold, the seasons, the mind, the de- 
cency of man, the instinct of animals — in short, that all 
physical and mental phenomena are governed by law, 
absolute, eternal, and inexorable." 

"Necessity," as he uses the term, is irresistible, in 
fact, it is omnipotence. Where is the room here for 
freedom of thought, speech, or action ? for virtue or 
vice, for good or evil, for praise or censure, for reward 
or punishment ? The gentle zephyr that plays with 
the curls and kisses the cheek of maidenhood, the rush 
of the tornado that carries death and desolation in the 
sweep of its course, the lightning's flash, the ocean's roar, 
the slaughter of thousands of men, women, and children, 
and the killing of a snake, or a tiger, all action, animate 
and inanimate, stands upon the same moral plane; that 
is, they are neither good nor bad. Even those who in- 
flicted the tortures which Col. Ingersoll so graphically 
describes, and all of which, in his imagination, he so 
acutely suffered, and whom he so fiercely denounces, 
were no more the proper subjects of praise or censure 
than the senseless, insensible instruments — the thumb- 
screw, the collar of torture, the scavenger's daughter, 
and the rack — which they used. All were alike the pas- 
sive, helpless instruments of an unreasoning, unintel- 
ligent, unfeeling, merciless, remorseless, omnipotent 
despotism, controlling alike all thought, feeling, and ac- 
tion of all existing things, animate and inanimate; a des- 
potism which they had no agency in creating, and have 
no power either to resist or to escape ; a tyranny infin- 
itely greater than that which Col. Ingersoll charges upon 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 119 

the Christian's God, and a slavery infinitely more help- 
less, hopeless, and abject than that which He is charged 
with imposing upon his subjects ; because the Christian 
faith admits that man may, if he chooses, disregard the 
commandments of God. While, according to Col. Inger- 
soll's faith, he has no power even to think of disregarding 
the decrees of his God. 

If his assertions as to the absolute irresistible control 
exerted by this "mechanical necessity" oyer the 
thoughts, feelings, sentiments, words, and actions of 
man are true, then all of Col. Ingersoll's professions of a 
desire to benefit his race, all of his boasts of free thought 
and free speech, all of his professed horror of wrong, op- 
pression, cruelty, and crime, all his professions of love 
for liberty, truth, justice, and right, instead of the in- 
spirations of a great intellect, and a brave and generous 
spirit, are as worthless as the incoherent ravings of a 
maniac, the work of an insensible and purposeless, but 
irresistible power, through a helpless and passive slave as 
its tool, without any will or even volition of his own, 
and no more worthy of censure or of punishment, or en- 
titled to praise or reward than the axe with which the 
woodman fells a tree, or the stone, with which he crushes 
the head of a serpent. 

As Col. Ingersoll has never " seen " in the outside 
world, nor " felt " within him anything pointing to, or 
requiring, a higher, state of existence, and as he claims 
to possess, cultivate, and practice all the virtues neces- 
sary to happiness, it follows that he must be as high in 
the scale of existence, and as wise, as good, and as happy 
as he wants to be, except that sometimes his pure and 



120 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

tender heart " bleeds when he contemplates the suffer- 
ings of millions now dead, of those who lived when the 
world appeared to be insane, when the heavens were filled 
with an infinite horror, who snatched babes with dim- 
pled hands and rosy cheeks from the white breasts of 
mothers, and dashed them into an abyss of eternal 
flames." 

This is a harrowing picture, and very like the case of 
the kitchen-maid, who, after standing and gazing for some 
time into a very hot fire, suddenly burst into a flood of 
tears with a loud and agonizing cry, and being asked 
what was the matter, as soon as she could get sufficient 
control of herself, sobbed out : " Oh, I was looking into 
that great hot fire, and all at once it came into my mind, 
suppose that one of these days I should get married and 
have a dear, sweet, little boy, the dearest, sweetest, pret- 
tiest little fellow in the world, and that when he got to 
be about two years old, just so as to toddle about the 
house, some day, when I was busy and not looking at 
him, he should fall into that great hot fire and get burnt 
to death. Oh, oh ! my dear, sweet, beautiful little baby, 
it would kill me." 

Poor Col. Ingersoll's heart bleeds over the imaginations 
of the past, the poor girl's over the imaginations of the 
future. 

The wonder is that Col. Ingersoll's heart, instead of 
bleeding, did not leap with joy and his sides shake with 
laughter at the idea of how the infinite horror was dis- 
appointed and fooled ; for, whatever the infinite horror 
might think, Col. Ingersoll knew that there was no 
" abyss of eternal flame " into which to cast the baby, 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 121 

and besides, eyen if there should be such an abyss, recog- 
nizing no such thing as a soul, he knew that after the 
babe was dead there was nothing to burn but a little piece 
of insensible matter that couldn't be hurt, and that after 
all it could be nothing more than anticipating the practice 
of cremation which seems to be growing into favor ; for 
he does not charge that the babes were cast into the fire 
aliye. 



CHAPTEE XXVI. 

In what I have written it was no part of my purpose to 
offer any proofs of the existence of a God of Creation. If 
I have occasionally asserted it, it was only when Col. In- 
gersoll's absurdities made the conclusion irresistible. I 
think I have shown that he has not produced a particle 
of evidence, or advanced an argument of even a show of 
plausibility against it. In fact it must be evident to any 
mind that examines the subject impartially in the light 
of reason and common sense, that it is impossible for him 
to do either ; for, as in one of his lucid intervals, he truly 
says : " In the absence of positive evidence, analogy, and 
experience, argument is simply imjx)ssible, and at the 
very best can amount only to the useless agitation of the 
air." This, of course, reduces him to simple, bare, as- 
sertion, for it is impossible that either of these things can 
be brought to his support. "Positive evidence" he does 
not pretend to claim ; "analogy" cannot exist, because 
there is no other universe proven to have existed from 
eternity to furnish it ; and, for the same reason, he is 
without "experience" for his support. They are all 
clearly and decidedly opposed to him. 

He has said in one of his lucid intervals, as we have 
several times quoted: "The mind of every thoughtful 
man is forced to one of these two conclusions : either that 
122 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 123 

the imiyerse is self -existing, or that it was created by a 
self -existent being." 

As abstract propositions, it is as easy to conceive of one 
as the other ; and, though the human intellect cannot 
take in the idea of anything without a beginning, we are 
compelled to accept the one or the other, on Col. Inger- 
soll's "unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called 
faith, " and, considered in connection with all that we 
know and see, reason and common sense compel us to 
reject the first. 

About the unknown we can reason only from what we 
know ; and, to reach with certainty the unknown cause 
of a known effect, it is absolutely necessary that we prove, 
first : That the assumed cause is adequate to the produc- 
tion of all the effect ; second, that no other cause is ca- 
pable of it. The first we must prove, because otherwise 
we may arbitrarily assume as a cause something entirely 
inadequate to the production of the effect, simply because 
we have not happened to find any other that could pro- 
duce it, as in my opinion is the case in ascribing the 
tides to the moon. The second we must prove, because 
if there is any other cause which can produce the effect, 
there is no certainty as to the real cause. Let us see how 
far Col. Ingersoll is sustained by this proof : 

"We see all the great worlds around us, which, so far as 
we know them, are composed of inert, unintelligent mat- . 
ter, moving with perfect regularity in their orbits. So 
far as we know anything of such matter, we know it has 
no properties by which it could devise and put into opera- 
tion a system bearing on the face of it incontestable evi- 
dence of such marvelous wisdom and stupendous power. 



124 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

Here is at least negative evidence from analogy against 
him. 

Then we know that long since our earth came into ex- 
istence there was neither animal nor vegetable life upon 
it, nor any possibility for the existence of either. Here 
is positive evidence against at least a part of his hy- 
pothesis. 

Our observations and experience prove to us that inert, 
unintelligent matter has no property which enables it to 
produce either animal or vegetable life. Here is at least 
negative evidence of experience against him — positive evi- 
dence, unless such property can be proven to exist. 

Even assuming that matter existed from eternity, it is 
utterly impossible to prove that it could produce all these 
effects, and equally impossible to prove that there is 
no other cause by which they could have been produced. 
I have admitted that some of the evidence is negative, 
as it may be possible that Col. Ingersoll's goddess nature 
may possess some secret powers, the existence of which 
she has not revealed to us common mortals, but, as he 
admits that she cannot create, and as after a trial of six 
thousand years, and we know not how much longer, 
she has failed to furnish any evidence that by her 
forming, transforming, and retransforming powers she 
has made one plant, or one animal out of another, it is 
perhaps safe to conclude, that she never did and never 
will. 

Before leaving this part of the subject, there are a few 
things to which I Will call his attention, and ask him, to 
explain. 

He talks much about the rights of men, women and 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 125 

children. Will he tell us how and whence we derived 
any rights, and what they are ? He cannot say that God 
has given us any, because there is no God. The only 
source, then, is " nature." But, "nature works without ; 
passion and without intention," and " produces man with- 
out purpose and obliterates him without regret." Then 
she had no intention, or purpose, to give us any rights ; 
and, if by accident she- had happened to give us any, we 
have no means of knowing what they are, and by the 
very next turn of her "transforming and retransforming" 
power she might "obliterate them without regret," so 
that we can't know whether we have any or not. Besides, 
having neither intention nor purpose in anything she 
does, she might accidentally give to one man one set of 
rights, and to another a set altogether different and op- 
posed to the first ; or, as we are all mere animals sprung 
from the " skulless vertebrates of the dim Laurentian 
seas," perhaps at the beginning she gave equally to all of 
the "inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness." If any of us have any rights more than the 
" skulless vertebrates," they must have been created ; 
and he says, she " cannot create." 

But, allowing that she could manage somehow to get 
them into existence, will he explain in what stage of ani- 
mal existence rights began ? For example, it is said that 
in Africa, where, I suppose, monkeys are evolved into 
negroes, young monkeys are a favorite and very deli- 
cate dish ; now will he inform us about how long after 
the monkey has evolved into the negro before the negro 
acquires the right to kill and eat his younger brother 
monkey, which might, if left alone, evolve into another 



126 MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 

negro ? Will he tell us why he has not as much right to 
eat a man as a beef, or a baby as a pig ? As " nature, 
without passion and without intention, forms, transforms, 
and retransforms forever," the beef and the pig might in 
the course of time evolve into Shakespeares, or even into 
an Ingersoll ; what right has he to cut them off from that 
high destiny ? I suppose he must entirely abstain from 
animal food, unless he has some of the cannibal in him, 
for he can never put a bit of animal food into his mouth 
without feeling that he is eating some of his kin. 

He says : "If we have the right to use our reason, we 
certainly have the right to act in accordance with it, and 
no God can have the right to punish us for such action." 
That may depend something of the kind of reason we 
use. Whose reason ? His or mine, or that of somebody 
else ? Every man claims to act in accordance with his 
reason. When two reasons conflict, one must be wrong. 
As Col. Ingersoll's goddess nature has "formed, trans- 
formed, and retransformed " so many different sorts of 
reason, it is well that we shall make an effort to see which 
is best ; but how shall we know ? for as "without pas- 
sion or intention" she keeps up the ojieration "forever," 
she may be now destroying every kind of reason that now 
exists, and making an entirely new set. Paine's reason 
taught him that there is a God. Voltaire, whom Col. 
Ingersoll calls "that great man, who for half a century 
was the intellectual emperor of Europe, and who, from 
his throne at the foot of the Alps, pointed the finger of 
scorn at every hypocrite in Christendom," was taught by 
reason that there is a God who created the universe. Will 
Col. Ingersoll assert, that these two of his greatest men 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL, 127 

did not understand what reason is ? In every age of the 
world the reason of the wisest and best men have taught 
them that there is a God. Col. Ingersoll's reason teaches 
him there is no God. Whose reason is most reliable ? 
Col. Ingersoll's reason teaches him that the Christian 
religion is the greatest curse that has been inflicted upon 
the human race, and that it is his duty to destroy it. 
For upwards of eighteen centuries the reason of the wis- 
est and best men has taught them that it is the only safe 
guide of man in all the business and relations of life. 
Whose reason is most to be trusted ? or who can tell what 
reason is ? 

However short even honest and sincere individuals or 
communities may come of living and acting in accord- 
ance with its teachings ; and however much reproach 
has been, or may yet be, cast upon it by the hypocrites 
and thieves who have prostituted to the gratification of 
their pride, ambition, and cupidity the influence and 
power they have acquired by a profession of devotion to 
its principles, the whole civilized world knows exactly 
what Christianity is. Outside of it, nobody knows what 
reason is, because outside of it reason does not exist. 
Christianity, in its purity, is the perfection of reason, 
the pure law of nature which God has communicated to 
man to purify, to elevate, and to bring him nigh to him- 
self. 

Of this I shall have more to say, when I come to treat 
of Christianity separately. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

Col. Ikgeksoll's hypothesis and theories are perhaps 
the best substitutes that have been or can be offered 
for a God of creation; but as they are utterly without 
evidence to support them, and opposed to reason and 
common sense, they must be discarded as worthless, at 
least until he succeeds, by his great discovery of the ele- 
ments of Doctor Eamrod's tincture of Gridiron, in proving 
that nature can supply him with wings and raise the 
dead. "Nous Verrons," as old Tom Ritchie used to say. 

In what I have written I have said, perhaps, a good 
many foolish things; but though Solomon has advised: 
" Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also 
be like unto him," I have thought this is a case suited 
to the other part of his advice: " Answer a fool accord- 
ing to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." 

I see, from one of Col. IngersolFs books, that he com- 
plains very bitterly of the abuse that has been visited 
upon him by the clergy and the religious press. This, 
besides being something like an admission that he has 
been worsted in the conflicts of his own seeking, seems to 
be in derogation of the laws of Knighterrantry, as ex- 
pounded by his great prototype, the famous Knight of 
La Mancha, who appears to have mastered all its laws, 
and fathomed all its principles from top to bottom, for 
as this redoubtable Knight was retiring from his famous 
128 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 129 

and rather disastrous conflict with the wind-mills, his 
faithful Squire, Sancho, said to him: " Pray, sir, sit a 
little more upright, for you lean strangely on one side, 
which must proceed from the bruises you received in 
your fall." To which the Knight replied, " Thou art in 
the right, and if I do not complain, it is because Knights- 
errant are not permitted to complain of any wound they 
receive, even though their bowels should come out of 
their bodies." 

Now, as Col. Ingersoll set out in search of adventures 
with as determined a purpose to succor the distressed, 
and to relieve the oppressed, as that by which the great 
Knight of La Mancha was inspired (with this difference, 
however, that Col. Ingersoll appears to have been richly 
compensated for his benevolent labors, while his prede- 
cessor encountered dangers and perils and afforded aid 
and succor at his own proper charges), and appears to 
have made his attacks with as little discretion, it would 
seem to be but fair to conclude that those whom he at- 
tacked were acting "in accordance with their reason," in 
defending themselves to the best of their ability ; and, 
if they have fought and worsted him with weapons of 
his own choosing, it seems a little unmanly that he should 
complain of the bruises he has received. 

It appears that both of these great Knights committed 
a grievous mistake as to the character of the enemies 
against which they so valiantly and confidently laid their 
lances in rest. 

The Knight of La Mancha believed that he was attack- 
ing nothing but thirty or forty giants, which he could, 
in a moment, kill or put to flight. After his overthrow, 
6* 



130 MISTAKES OF IXGERSOLL. 

lie accounted for his discomfiture by charging that his 
enemy, the " Sage Preston, had converted these giants 
into wind-mills to rob him of the honor of their over- 
throw. 

Col. Ingersoll appears to have entertained the opinion 
that he was attacking ghosts, phantoms, and spirits, 
which would, at the first sound of his voice, as they are 
said to do at the crowing of the cock, 

" Vanish like a guilty thing 
Upon a fearful summons." 

Instead of that, he has found himself confronted by 
stalwart beings of flesh and blood, and thews and 
sinews, and of passions, too, by whom he was speedily 
taught that in his battles " blows were to be given, as 
well as received. " 

I do not know what the clergy or the religious press 
have said of him; for although the publisher of his lec- 
tures, I suppose by his direction, says: "Hundreds of 
pamphlets have been published, thousands of sermons 
have been preached, and numberless articles have been 
written against them, with the effect of increasing their 
popularity every day ; " the only thing I have ever seen 
on the subject, either from the clergy, or the religious 
press, was Talmage's sermon two or three weeks ago. 
In fact, it is but little over two years that I recollect ever 
to have heard his name. Within the past few months I 
have seen him spoken of by the secular press as the 
"great blasphemer." 

I suppose he must have been much belabored by the 
clergy and the religious press, and even by the secular 



MISTAKES OF INGEESOLL. 131 

press, in which it is my opinion that, impelled by a zeal 
not according to knowledge, they haye failed to exercise 
a wise discretion or a high degree of Christian charity. 

Col. Ingersoll's great prototype suffered from many se- 
vere punishments, because those whom he assailed failed 
to perceive that his excess of benevolence had converted 
him into a raving maniac. 

Col. Ingersoll has, as I judge, suffered much from the 
same cause, as the first effect of a personal assault, even 
upon a man of sound mind, is to excite the angry pas- 
sions, and not content with defending himself from in- 
jury until he can learn the cause of the assault, he goes 
about to inflict as much injury upon the assailant as pos- 
sible. This is not in accordance with the teachings of 
Christianity, though it may be i ' in accordance with 
reason," according to Col. Ingersoll's ideas of reason. 

Now, if those whom he has assailed had not permitted 
" their angry passions to rise," a very little reflection 
would have disclosed to them his insanity, of which the 
evidences are so conspicuous and so abundant, and their 
anger would have changed into pity and compassion, and 
induced a very different sort of treatment. 

"What sense or charity, for example, or humanity can 
there be in charging the horrible crime of blasphemy to 
a poor unfortunate fellow-creature whose intellect is so 
unhinged and disjointed, that all the grandeur and glory, 
and beauties, and bounties of creation, instead of point- 
ing to a God, the creator, governor, and preserver of all, 
serve only to run him off into a wild hunt for some im- 
possible mode by which they created themselves. 

I have carefully abstained from charging to any wick- 



132 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

edness of intention, those things which, if done or said 
by a man of sound mind, would indicate a bad heart, 
because the evidences of insanity are too strong, and too 
clearly manifested to be either overlooked or mistaken by 
any cool-headed, reflecting man, and because he is re- 
ported to be, in his lucid intervals, a good, kind-hearted 
fellow, and because, in those intervals, he frequently gives 
expression in beautiful and eloquent terms to some of the 
best feelings and sentiments of humanity. 

True, in exposing his absurdities and extravagancies, 
I have treated some of them as the emanations from a 
mind otherwise sound, because the intervals often change 
so suddenly and abruptly from the one to the other, and, 
by that acuteness and cunning often accompanying in- 
sanity, the sane and insane are so adroitly mixed up to- 
gether, that the hearer, unapprised of the mental con- 
dition of the speaker, might, without critical examination, 
accept both as sound, against which I desire to put all 
upon their guard, that they may separate the good from 
that which is, to say, the least worthless. 

Of course, Col. Ingersoll is unconscious of these tilings ; 
his intellect looks at things like a man viewing a land- 
scape through a wrinkled joane of glass, to whose view all 
things are presented distorted, and in a confused, incon- 
gruous, jumbled mass ; or more properly, perhaps, his 
intellect may be considered a sort of kaleidoscope, a pretty 
toy, consisting of a tube with two or more mirrors in it ; 
at one end is a small compartment in which are placed 
pieces of glass of various colors, crooked pins, pieces of 
brass and steel, anything that glistens, but of no value. 
As often as the tube is turned these fragments change 



MISTAKES OF rNGEKSOLL. 133 

places without order or system, and present a new mix- 
ture of the beautiful and the deformed. So Col. Inger- 
soll's mind appears to haye gathered up a multitude of 
fragments of but little or no value that I can perceive, 
and having unlimited command of language, an inex- 
haustible supply of topics and figures, a clear utterance 
and elegant action, he can present these fragments in 
new — and sometimes beautiful — forms without end ; so 
that when he begins to talk or speak, there is no reason 
why he should ever stop, but from mere physical ex- 
haustion. 

" The fool hath planted in his memory 
An army of good words ; and I do know 
A many fools that stand in better place, 
Garnished like him, that for a tricksy word 
Defy the matter." 

" This man-lady hath robbed many beasts of their par- 
ticular additions." [Perhaps the various beasts through 
which he has passed from "the skulless vertebrate in the 
dim Laurentian seas " to his present condition]. " A man 
into whom nature hath so crowded humors, that his valor 
is crushed into folly, his folly sauced with discretion ; 
there is no man hath a virtue that he hath not a glimpse 
of it ; nor any man an attaint, but he carries some stain 
of it. He hath the joints of everything ; but everything 
so out of joint that he is a gouty Briareus, many hands 
and no use, or purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight." 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

There is, perhaps, a not very small number of people 
in the world, who, believing fully in the existence of a 
God who created all things, yet, because they cannot un- 
derstand his whole purposes in regard to man and the 
manner of working them out, entertain doubts as to his 
taking any interest or exercising any control over our af- 
fairs. There is another class, and probably large in num- 
bers, who, from the same causes, are often tempted to 
impeach his justice, goodness, and mercy, because in the 
affairs of the world many things occur which, in their 
judgment, are inconsistent with the existence of those 
qualities in a being having full power to prevent them. 
These things I shall discuss when I come to speak of his 
moral character. 

But whatever doubts men may have, and whatever 
difficulties they may have on these subjects, there has 
never been a man of sound, well-balanced intellect open to 
the reception of the truth, who has doubted the existence 
of a God of Creation ; for instead of having to search for 
evidences in support of it, they unsought press themselves 
upon us from all points with irresistible force ; and in 
the attempt to array and enumerate them, the mind is 
bewildered and overwhelmed by their number, variety, and 
power. To present even a few of them to a sound and 
healthy mind for the purpose of conviction, is therefore 
134 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 135 

simply a work of supererogation ; to attempt to array and 
present them all would be to engage in a never-ending labor. 

I propose, therefore, to present here only a few of the 
most prominent and familiar, not so much with the view 
of convincing anybody, as to bring to the mind a few more 
of Col. Ingersoll's absurdities, more conspicuously and in 
stronger relief by contrast. 

As I have several times mentioned, Col. Ingersoll, in 
one of his lucid intervals has said : " The mind of every 
thoughtful man is forced to one of these two. conclusions: 
either that the universe is self-existent, or that it was 
created by a self-existent being." This was an unfortu- 
nate and even a fatal admission, for self-evident though it 
be, he has, by unthoughtfully admitting it, thrown away 
his armor and his weapons, and left himself open to and 
defenseless against the assaults of right, reasop, and 
science, which are daily adding to the evidences against 
him. 

The simple admission of the possibility that the universe 
may have been created by a self-existent being settles the 
question against him. Creation means infinite power and 
infinite intelligence. It is as easy, to say the least of it, 
for the human mind to grasp the idea of a self-existent 
being of infinite power and wisdom who created all things, 
as the idea of the self-existence of the universe ; and a 
sound, intelligent mind, in view of the wonderful power 
and wisdom manifested in the order, arrangement, and 
system everywhere displayed through all the works of 
creation, will find it much easier to accept them as the 
work of infinite power and intelligence, than as the chance 
productions of blind, lifeless, unintelligent matter. 



136 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

And while, even as to the material world, we neither 
do nor can know anything beyond the facts that we see, 
there is in the hypothesis that all things were created by 
a self-existent being nothing inconsistent with or opposed 
to anything that we see or know ; while Col. IngersolPs 
hypothesis at every step comes in direct conflict with all 
that we do or ever have seen or known ; for example, 
that the whole human race came, through the monkey and 
the negro, from " the skulless vertebrates of the dim Lau- 
rentian seas." I wonder how the beautiful women who 
are reported to flock in great numbers to hear Col. Tnger- 
soll prove it like the idea. Are they, like him, proud of 
their ancestry ? 

I am proposing to present now a few of the evidences 
of the existence of a God of Creation, without reference to 
any of his attributes except infinite power, and infinite 
intelligence ; I shall, for the present, discard the Bible, 
even at the risk of subjecting myself to the suspicion of 
putting Col. Ingersoll upon the rack. 

I adopt this course, as I have stated upon another occa- 
sion, because those who believe in the Bible account require 
no further evidence of the existence of a God, and because, 
with those who do not believe in a God, the Bible will 
be no authority. What a God-send the Bible has been to 
Col. Ingersoll! It is difficult to perceive how he could have 
managed to get along without it. It has furnished a large 
portion of the staples of his lectures ; it has supplied him 
with material for the exercise and display of his powers 
of travesty, ridicule, burlesque caricature, denunciation, 
and invective, upon which he lias industriously and per- 
severingly rung the changes, upon almost all occasions 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 137 

and upon almost every subject upon which he has 
lectured. He has found in it, as he supposes, everything 
that is absurd, grotesque, false, hypocritical, cruel, tyran- 
nical, merciless, unjust, low, mean, base, and infamous, 
upon which to descant to the crowd. Of this I shall 
have something to say when I come to speak of the Bible ; 
for the present, I shall direct my attention to some of 
the evidences outside of it. 

First, we see this grand universe spread out before us 
in all its glory, by its vastness impressing at once upon 
every rational mind the conviction that it is the work of 
infinite power. We see all these great worlds revolving 
in their regular orbits and in their regular times, without 
delay, change, or variation, impressing us with the con- 
viction that all these things are the result of plan and 
design by an infinite intelligence as well as infinite 
power. These convictions are forced upon every rational 
mind which will give to these subjects a moment's serious 
contemplation. 

Col. Ingersoll says : "1 know as little as any one else 
about the 'plan' of the universe, and as to the i design,' 
I know just as little." That, I have no doubt, is true, but 
the world has probably yet to learn that his ignorance 
of any truth is evidence that it does not exist. He con- 
tinues : "It will not do to say that the universe was de- 
signed, and therefore there must be a designer ; there 
must first be proof that it was designed." 

This is a mere trifling with words, simply a pitiful, 
stupid evasion; the man that cannot see them is an 
idiot ; he that, being one remove from idiocy, will not see 
them, is prepared to discard all the evidence of his senses 
and deny his own existence. 



138 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

There are many things self-evident; that is, so plain that 
neither argument nor evidence can make them any clearer. 

Col. Ingersoll, upon examination of a watch, would 
scarcely be willing to stultify himself by saying, " there 
is no evidence that it had a designer, until other proof 
is furnished that it was designed. " 

If he were to find a house elegantly furnished with 
everything that could promote comfort and gratify the 
taste, and upon remarking that these things must have 
been planned and designed by some person of excellent 
judgment and exquisite taste, some one should reply: "I 
know as little as any one else about the plan, and as to 
the design, I know just as little. It will not do to say, 
all this was designed, and therefore there must be a de- 
signer ; there must first be proof that it was designed," 
he would, unless restrained by a sense of politeness, or a 
decent regard for the opinions, or a delicate forbearance 
with the ignorance, of others, of the possession of which 
there is very little evidence in his lectures, reply : "You 
are a fool ; it admits of neither argument nor proof ; the 
inspection alone makes the design as clear as the exist- 
ence of the house and furniture themselves." So the 
simple inspection of the universe affords to a reasonable 
and honest mind as perfect and conclusive evidence of 
plan and design as of the existence of the universe it- 
self, and both furnish incontestable proof that it is the 
work of infinite power and infinite intelligence. Col. 
Ingersoll continues with a parcel of nonsense about getting 
behind to another "designer," to which it is only neces- 
sary to say, that when we have reached infinity there is 
nothing beyond, 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 139 

In refusing to accept, upon honest conviction, a self- 
existent being of infinite power and intelligence as crea- 
tor and governor of the universe, the only alternative 
left Col. Ingersoll is, by " that unhappy mixture of in- 
sanity and ignorance called faith," or by that obstinate 
stupidity which is blind to evidence and deaf to reason, 
to ascribe all the wonders of the universe to that blind, un- 
intelligent thing which he calls nature, and which he says 
works "without intention" and "without purpose." 

Col. Ingersoll, in one of his lucid intervals, says : " Be- 
sides, you must remember that every wrong, in some way, 
tends to abolish itself." This may possibly prove pro- 
phetic. His ferocious attacks upon God, the Bible, and 
Christianity, will doubtless influence multitudes, who, in 
the absorbing pursuits of life, have thought but little on 
these subjects, to investigate his charges ; and it may 
awaken the church to the consciousness of the great dis- 
tance to which in the eager pursuit of the things of the 
world and the indulgence of " the lust of the eye and 
the pride of life" it has strayed from the pure, self- 
denying principles and practices of Christianity as taught 
by its great founder, by which it has given " occasion to 
the adversary to speak reproachfully ; " for it cannot be 
denied that, as Dr. Talmage said recently, "the incon- 
sistency of the church supplies to infidelity its strongest 
weapons against Christianity." I am not sure that I have 
given the exact words, as I quote from memory. 

Col. Ingersoll proceeds: "It is hard to make a lie 
stand always. A lie will not fit a fact. It will only fit 
another lie made for the purpose. The life of a lie is 
only a question of time. Nothing but truth is immortal." 



140 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

In his insane anxiety to destroy God, the Bible, and 
Christianity, he adopts the lie that "the universe is self- 
existent from eternity." But he is met by the fact that 
a long way this side of eternity there neither did nor 
could exist upon the earth either animal or vegetable life. 
The lie does not fit the fact. To get around the diffi- 
culty, he adopts the other lie, that what he calls nature 
has produced all the vegetable and animal life. He de- 
nies her the power to create, for to allow her that power 
would conflict with the first lie, that there has been 
nothing created. But without informing us what she is, 
whence she came, whether she too existed from eternity 
or was created since, how, or whence she derived her 
power, he asserts that by forming, transforming, and re- 
transforming forever (which I suppose means from eter- 
nity), she has, from inert, insensible, unintelligent matter, 
and matter which had been melted and steamed for un- 
known periods of time, formed vegetable and animal life, 
sensation, consciousness, and intellect. This lie has for 
its support nothing but bare assertion, and is met by the 
fact, which it does not fit, that there is not a particle of 
evidence that there is in existence a vegetable or an ani- 
mal which was not in existence when the work of crea- 
tion was closed by the production of man ; and we have 
positive evidence that all plants and animals now existing 
retain the same distinguishing characteristics that marked 
them as far back as history or tradition can trace them ; 
and of plants and animals now existing we find remains 
dating far beyond the reach of history or tradition, which 
prove that they were essentially the same as now. 

Besides inducing men to examine into the truth of his 



MISTAKES OF IEGEESOLL. 141 

charges and the force of what he calls his arguments, his 
attacks upon God, the Bible, and Christianity will per- 
haps lead them to investigate the testimony against him. 

We are so much in the habit of seeing from day to day 
and year to year the grandeur and beauties of creation 
and of enjoying the benefits derived from them, that we 
come to look upon them as matters of course, in which 
we have no esj)ecial interest. 

How few are there who, in seeing at night all the great 
worlds in view, think of asking themselves how came they 
there and how is it that they are kept in their places ? 
By whomsoever that question may be seriously asked, to 
him will be returned the answer, "It is all the work of 
infinite power and infinite intelligence." If he should ask 
"Why are they there ?" the answer will be, "You cannot 
know all the reasons, but this much you can know, that, 
in part at least, they are there for your benefit." We do 
not know how much they are necessary to our well-being, 
nor can we, unless we were deprived of them. If we could 
imagine the " darkness that could be felt " in which we 
should have to move at night if the stars and the moon 
were blotted out, we might form some faint, and only a 
faint, conception of the blessings we derive from them. 

' ' For so it falls out, 
That what we have, we prize not to the worth, 
Whiles we enjoy it; but being lack'd and lost, 
Why then, we rack the value ; then we find 
The virtue, that possession would not show us, 
Whiles it was ours." 



CHAPTEE XXIX. 

But the mind of a thoughtful man need not go outside 
of himself for evidence that will force conviction upon 
him. As a mere animal, he finds himself surrounded on 
all sides by other animals vastly his superiors in all the 
means of attack, defense, escape from danger or injury, 
and the means of obtaining subsistence. In these things 
even the insects, in short, to use the language of Col. 
Ingersoll, " All that crawls and swims and floats and 
climbs and walks," are his superiors in all things neces- 
sary to life. He finds that of all the animal creation 
there are but few which come into life so helpless and so 
utterly incapable of taking care of and of providing for 
themselves as man, and that those few acquire this power 
while man is still in his helpless infancy. He has not, like 
all other animals that draw their first support from the 
mother, even the instinct which teaches them where and 
how to procure it. As a mere animal his condition is 
but little better at maturity. Take a perfect physical 
man without intellect to-day, and he is utterly unable to 
provide himself the means of living. Wipe out from the 
face of the earth all that has been done since man came 
upon it, and give to this perfect physical man perfect in- 
tellect, divested of all that we have learned from observa- 
tion and experience, and he would be the same helpless, 
defenseless creature, incapable of sustaining life. 
142 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 143 

If Col. Ingersoll, in all the maturity of manhood, with 
all his learning, reason, science, and eloquence, were to-day 
put naked in the ring with one of the recent descendants 
of his far-off ancestry, a three-year-old monkey, he would 
come out rather the worse for wear, unless the instinct of 
kinship should mollify the rage of the monkey. If he 
should engage with a wild boar, it is likely that, without 
some providential interference in his behalf, we should 
have no more of his lectures. If he should happen to 
find himself in a pen with a mad bull I imagine the re- 
sult would be like that which occurred with a man I once 
knew : 

Having on his farm an unruly and vicious steer, which 
he had determined to convert into beef, he had him 
driven into a lot inclosed by a high and strong fence, and, 
having no gun at hand, directed three of his men to 
knock him on the head with an axe. After manceuver- 
ing in vain for some time to get near enough to the steer 
to inflict the fatal blow, he became enraged, assumed the 
aggressive, and went for the men, whereupon they put 
the fence between him and themselves with all possible 
speed, and reported the attempt to kill him in that way 
so full of danger that they could not renew it. 

Like Israel Putnam, when his negro man refused to 
undertake a second interview with that terrible old she- 
wolf in her den, our hero declared he was ashamed to 
have such cowards on his place, and that he would kill 
the steer himself. Accordingly, pulling off his coat, and 
rolling up his sleeves, he proceeded to the lot, clambered 
over the fence and, with axe in hand, boldly marched for 
the steer. 



144 MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 

But the steer, already enraged by previous persecutions, 
and perhaps emboldened by the ease with which he had 
put the others to flight, did not wait for the attack, but 
made a rush for the invader before he had passed over 
half the ground between them. 

Doubtless, our hero felt that his great size (for his 
avoirdupois was over two hundred pounds), his lordly 
bearing and threatening attitude would at once intimi- 
date the steer into submission ; and that his already well- 
established reputation for courage would be largely in- 
creased by the performance, single-handed, of a feat 
which three men had not dared to undertake. But the 
sudden and unmistakable demonstration that his appear- 
ance, so far from producing these effects, had made the 
steer more ready for the fray produced a revulsion of 
feeling, and he was seized with a panic like that to which, 
it is said, the bravest men, even in large numbers, are 
sometimes subject, and, dropping the axe, he ingloriously 
fled, and as he fled he cried out to his men, "Tell Lucy 
I died game ! " Lucy was his wife. 

Fortunately he had so much the start, and his flight 
was so rapid, that he escaped without injury, save a rent 
m his nether garment and few slight bruises, from the 
precipitancy with which, by a little aid from the steer, 
he reached the ground on the other side of the fence. 

Just imagine Col. Ingersoll, naked and unarmed, flee- 
ing across an open plain from a mad bull ; wouldn't he 
wish that just then nature would come along with some 
of Dr. Kamrod's Tincture of Gridiron, and raise him a 
good pair of wings, or at least that somebody was there 
to bear testimony to his wife, that "he died game ?" 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 145 

Now I am far from asserting that Col. Ingersoll would 
flee under such circumstances, though Redpath reports 
him as having made good time on one occasion, when 
Ned Forest was after him, though it was of no avail, as 
in consequence of a mistake of his horse in falling down, 
Forest caught him, and after keeping him a while dis- 
charged him on his parole, and he never went back. Red- 
path says : " Ingersoll said to me of his career, ' I was not 
fit to be a soldier; I never saw our men fire but I thought 
of the widows and orphans they would make, and wished 
they would miss.' " No doubt, Ingersoll is a good, 
kind-hearted fellow, but I should not be surprised if he 
was thinking as much of the widows and orphans that 
might be made by the other fellows, as by his own men. 

But to return to the monkey and the rest of animal 
existence. 

Can Col. Ingersoll explain to us, upon the theory of 
his "honest thought," how it is that all these animals, 
from "the skulless vertebrates in the dim Lauren tian 
seas," to the highest type of the brute creation, have all 
entered into life so greatly the superiors of man in every 
power necessary to the preservation of life, and that they 
have never learned anything beyond what was born with 
them, except a few things which a few of them have 
been taught by man ? and how it is that from generation 
to generation they have not advanced a step from their 
original state ; that they have no means of procuring 
subsistence beyond that which God, or, as Col. Ingersoll 
would say, ie nature," has provided for them ; that they 
have no past, no future, nothing but the present ; that, 
their present hunger and thirst satisfied, they lie clown 



146 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL, 

in quiet, or exercise their physical powers in play, taking 
no thought for anything, until the nature with which 
God has endowed them demands more food ; and that 
from day to day, and from the beginning to the close of 
life, this is their history. 

Can Col. Ingersoll explain to us how, when, where, and 
by what means this monkey, well-clothed and eminently 
endowed with all the powers for attack, defense, escape 
from danger and injury, and the means of procuring 
his subsistence, was treated so inhumanly as to be re- 
duced down to that naked, and, as a mere animal, the most 
helpless, defenseless, and dependent of all animals — man, 
and that man a negro, the most ignorant and helpless of 
all the human race. For, be it remembered that neither 
Col. Ingersoll nor any of his sect pretend to claim that 
nature ever makes men out of anything but monkeys, 
nor any men out of monkeys but negroes. 

Can he explain how it is that this lowest type of man, 
starting life in this helpless and defenseless condition, 
and in the midst of the most powerful, physically, and 
by instinct the most cruel, ferocious, and destructive to 
animal life of all animal existences, should not only have 
survived, but, low as they are in the scale of human exist- 
ence, should have reached a condition which enables 
them to master all the brute creation. 

Of course, according to Col. Ingersoll's "honest 
thought," the negro is the origin of the human race, 
and from it all mankind are descended. He says, "man 
cannot conceive of anything utterly unlike what he has 
seen or felt." I suppose he has never seen a negro 
changed into a white man, but, as he conceives of such a 



MISTAKES OF INGEKSOLL. 147 

thing, it must be because be feels some of tbe negro in 
him. I haye never seen him, but, judging from his 
pictures so widely scattered oyer the country, the only 
trace of the negro that I can see is in his thick lips. 

As far back as history or tradition gives us any in- 
formation, the negro was the same that he is now ; and 
since, according to Col. Ingersoll's "honest thought," 
all the people that nature has made were made out of 
monkeys and were negroes ; and as it has never been 
known that nature has changed negroes into white 
peoj)le, can Col. Ingersoll explain how white and other 
races came into existence ? 

As he is a man of wonderful resources, perhaps he has 
found some white monkeys that came up from " the skul- 
less vertebrates of the dim Laurentian seas " to make 
white people out of ; but if he has not, it don't matter, 
as his powers of assertion without proof are sufficient to 
supply them. 

But admit that he may somehow manage, through 
nature's "forming, transforming, and retransforming " 
power, to get up some white people 5 according to his 
theory they must come into existence the same helpless, 
defenseless, dependent beings, the easy prey of all other 
animals, and without even instinct to teach them how to 
begin to sustain life. Can he explain how it is that this, 
as a mere animal, the most helpless and, inefficient of all, 
came not only to survive, but to acquire powers and 
faculties of which all other animals are utterly destitute ; 
and knowledge infinitely beyond their reach, by which he 
is enabled to subjugate to his use and control to his will 
the powers and capacities of all else, animate and inani- 



148 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

mate ? And how it is that, as far back as man has any 
history, he has commenced life in this helpless condition, 
and in his maturity has exercised this unlimited control. 

The man who, in the face of the light of this age, is 
so insane as to entertain the " honest thought" and make 
the boast that he derives his existence from "the skulless 
vertebrates of the dim Lauren tian seas" through the 
monkey and the negro, has not made progress enough in 
intellectual improvement to reflect much credit even upon 
his assumed ancestry. It is therefore not to be expected 
that Col. Ingersoll can explain these things upon his hy- 
pothesis, or that his intellect can even take them in, as 
requiring explanation ; for, as a child shut up in a dark 
room, into which there is one ray of sunshine beaming 
through a crack, sees nothing but the j3articles of dust 
floating in the sunbeam, although the walls may be decked 
with the finest paintings and the floor spread with the 
richest gems; so the hallucination that "there is no 
God " has taken such entire possession of all of Col. In- 
gersoll's faculties that, although the evidences against 
him are scattered broadcast through the whole uni- 
verse, he is unable to perceive anything but the wild ab- 
surdities which his distempered imagination tells him are 
all that "is." 

But a man of honest mind, amenable to the dictates of 
sound reason and common sense, looking in upon him- 
self, seeing what he was, what he is, and feeling what he 
may become,finds the explanation written in letters of light 
brighter than the beams of the midday sun — " Man was 
created with all the faculties and powers he now possesses, 
by a being of infinite power and wisdom, and preserved 
and taught by that being, until he learned to use them." 



CHAPTEE XXX. 

There is one thing which it appears to me must be a 
matter of constant wonder to Col. Ingersoll. It is that, al- 
though nature has made man, and elephants, and whales, 
and all other animals, and the hills, and rocks, and trees, 
and mountains, and rivers, with such an abundant supply of 
materials at hand she has never made a house, or a wagon, 
nor even a wheelbarrow, or a broom. It is true, he says that 
" without intention, she forms, transforms, and retrans- 
forms forever ;" of course all these things were made by 
accident, but it is strange that in all her random work 
for so many thousands of years she never even by acci- 
dent made a house, a wagon, a gate, a pair of shoes, or 
something else of that sort. I do not say that she never 
did anything of that kind, but I have never heard that 
she did, and it may be for aught that I know that she 
did, about the time that she made man and all other ani- 
mals ; but if she did, it was so long ago that we have no 
more evidence of it than we have that Col. Ingersoll came 
up from the "skulless vertebrates of the dim Laurentian 
seas," and indeed not so much, for we have his word for 
that. What incalculable blessings, according to his stand- 
ard, he may bestow upon us, if, when by the use of his 
grand discovery of the life-giving elements of Dr. Ram- 
rod's Tincture of Gridiron he succeeds in training nature 
to making wings and raising the dead, he will set her to 

149 



150 MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 

work in building houses, making carriages, steam-engines, 
and all other things that we need, and are now compelled 
to procure by constant toil, thereby proving to us that we 
are indebted to nature not only for existence but every- 
thing else. 

Until then, we may be content to ascribe all the grand- 
eur and all the glories of the universe, and all the bless- 
ings we derive from them, to the work of a God of infinite 
power and wisdom, and to recognize in what we call na- 
ture, not the power, nor the source of power, by which 
all these things came into being, but the representation 
of the laws by which he governs all his works, and the 
reflection from them of his power, wisdom, and goodness, 
a reflection w r hich serves to point us to the maker, pre- 
server, and father of all. 

Like Col. Ingersoll, I have given you my honest thought 
as to his effort to kill off a God of Creation. I have in 
process of preparation another volume, in which I propose 
to consider of him in reference to the moral character of 
God, the Bible, and Christianity. 

James N. Bethune. 

Warrenton, Virginia. 



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